DÍAZ, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2008.

Octavo. Full red-brown leather. Spine with three raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. Gilt design, lettering and fore-edges. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. 340 pp. Signed Collector's Edition. Signed by the author on the special signature page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity (edges a touch tattered), Collector's Notes, and bookplate adhered to front endpaper. Originally published New York: Riverhead Books, 2007.

Junot Díaz (b. 1968) was born in Santo Domingo and raised in New Jersey, and has described his fiction as the product of that specific double displacement — the Dominican Republic he left at six and the New Jersey he arrived in, neither of which ever fully became home. He graduated from Rutgers, took his MFA from Cornell, and is currently the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at MIT. His debut collection Drown (1996) established him as one of the most original voices in American fiction; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, his first novel, won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a MacArthur Fellowship followed in 2012. The New York Times placed it among the 100 best books of the 21st century.

Oscar de León — Oscar Wao — is a fat, bookish, desperately romantic Dominican-American kid growing up in Paterson, New Jersey in the 1980s. He loves science fiction and fantasy with the consuming fervour of a true believer, has never had a girlfriend despite wanting nothing more, and is haunted by what his family calls the fukú — the curse or doom that has followed the de León family across generations, traceable to the Trujillo dictatorship and perhaps further back. The novel narrates Oscar's story, his sister Lola's story, and the history of his family in the Dominican Republic under Trujillo, moving between Paterson in the 1980s and Santo Domingo across the middle decades of the twentieth century, with the narrator Yunior — Oscar's college roommate and Lola's sometime boyfriend — holding everything together in a voice of extraordinary range and energy.

That voice is the novel's central achievement: bilingual, promiscuous in its cultural references, capable of moving between footnoted historical analysis and street comedy and genuine grief within the same paragraph, and animated throughout by the kind of controlled rage that comes from knowing exactly what has been done to a people and what continues to be done. The prose mixes English and Spanish, geek culture and Caribbean folklore, Tolkien and Trujillo, in a way that enacts its subject — the experience of living between cultures, languages, and histories — rather than merely describing it. Michael Chabon described it as a "wonder — brutal and funny and passionate all at once."

Very good. Some loss to cover gilt; some markings along gilt edges. Certificate of Authenticity edges a touch tattered. Otherwise fine throughout.

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Catalogue Number: HH000570