The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Summary

The novel follows Oscar, an overweight Dominican-American science-fiction obsessive growing up in New Jersey, while reaching back into his family's history under the Trujillo dictatorship. Díaz mixes English and Spanish, street vernacular and academic footnotes, comic-book lore and political horror, conjuring a distinctive transnational voice. The book is widely regarded as a landmark of twenty-first-century Latinx fiction.