I furnish Yunior with a lot of my stuff so I don't have to buy anything new and while friends of mine can see small elements of me in him, I've spun him a little sharper to stand out more starkly. I put the back problem in the very last rewrite having been working on that story for six years. 'Our cancer stories are different, but what they share is a young person getting an early masterclass in mortality. Like Yunior, DГaz has a back problem вЂ“ he constantly has to alternate between standing and sitting вЂ“ as a result of delivering pool tables to pay his way through college. Like DГaz's brother, Yunior's brother contracted cancer, although DГaz's brother survived. You never get a sense of what happens to him.' This Is How You Lose Her once again features Yunior, DГaz's alter ego through whom he engages with the intersection of race, gender, immigration and class. I also wanted to return to the brother's cancer. 'And I knew I wanted to write another book of linked stories about the rise and fall of a cheater. 'There was a lot of background infidelity in Drown,' he explains. This month he publishes his third book, This Is How You Lose Her, in which he returns to the characters and settings from Drown. When The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao вЂ“ a novel about a 'fat Dominican nerd, complete with Dungeons and Dragons dredged from my own nerd closet, which I'm sure my publishers wouldn't have expected after Drown' вЂ“ did emerge in 2008 it won the Pulitzer prize for fiction. However, despite the silence, his reputation, and, more surprisingly, his profile, remained strong. 'Even I thought I would be a writer who put something out every year,' he says now. Prizes, commercial and critical acclaim, and attendant stories of large advances came accompanied by invitations to fancy parties and an assumption that DГaz had embarked on a long and fruitful career.ДЄs things turned out he attended few of the literary parties вЂ“ 'I discovered early that as an artist there was absolutely nothing wrong with being surrounded by people who were not dedicated to your field' вЂ“ and the money didn't last forever, not least because, far from becoming a fixture on the bestseller lists, DГaz didn't produce another book for 12 years. Located in the barrios of New Jersey and the Dominican Republic, and filtered through the sensibility of a poor immigrant who made it to Rutgers University, the then 27-year-old's dispatches from his community вЂ“ 'separated from all the other communities by a six lane highway and the dump', as he said at the time вЂ“ became a New York literary sensation. вЂњMagnificentвЂ¦an exuberant rendering of the driving rhythms and juicy Spanglish vocabulary of immigrant speechвЂ¦sharply observed and morally challenging.W hen Junot DГaz published his debut collection of linked stories, Drown, in 1996, it appeared that the trajectory of his writing career had been set. These stories are hard and sad, but in DГazвЂ™s hands they also crackle.вЂќ вЂњDГazвЂ™s third book is as stunning as its predecessors. These are precarious, unappreciated, precious lives in which intimacy is a lost art, masculinity a parody, and kindness, reason, and hope struggle to survive like seedlings in a war zone.вЂќ вЂњDГazвЂ™s standout fiction remains pinpoint, sinuous, gutsy, and imaginativeвЂ¦Each taut tale of unrequited and betrayed love and family crises is electric with passionate observations and off-the-charts emotional and social intelligenceвЂ¦Fast-paced, unflinching, complexly funny, street-talking tough, perfectly made, and deeply sensitive, DГazвЂ™s gripping stories unveil lives shadowed by prejudice and poverty and bereft of reliable love and trust. Raw and honest, these stories pulsate with raspy ghetto hip-hop and the subtler yet more vital echo of the human heart.вЂќ вЂњSearing, sometimes hilarious, and always disarming вЂ¦ Readers will remember why everyone wants to write like DГaz, bring him home, or both. To the yearning, clumsy ways young men come of age.вЂќ вЂњRibald, streetwise, and stunningly moving-a testament, like most of his work, вЂњExhibits the potent blend of literary eloquence and street cred that earned him a Pulizer Prize вЂ¦ DГazвЂ™s prose is vulgar, brave, and poetic.вЂќ

Junot diaz short stories