Literary Fiction by People of Color discussion

Yet another interesting interview with Junot Diaz at Salon.com. Here's part of it:

What’s going on, young people!?” His exuberance was so infectious I could barely stifle a reply of “falafels, yo!” (I resisted, mercifully). Before my friends realized what was happening, he was peppering us with questions about where we were from, what we were studying, what we wanted to do. He was a dude, and he was cool — far cooler than he had any reason to be with a group of strangers in a shawarma dive on a frigid winter afternoon. Mostly he sounded exactly like the effervescent narrator of his fiction, Yunior made flesh.

I was reminded of this run-in when I found him trembling very slightly beside a sculpture of a golden sea urchin in the lobby of the SoHo Trump hotel earlier this month. Diaz blamed his inability to sit down on severe back problems. Yunior, the protagonist of his latest short story collection about a “scumbag cheater,” suffers from stenosis and a numbing sensation in his arms and legs. And yet despite these many parallels, Diaz would be the first to admit that he both is and is not the hero of his short stories. “The same way you’re a complex person when you read,” he says, “I’m a complex person when I write.”

It’s this tension in part that makes “This is How You Lose Her,” like “Drown” and “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” before it, so readable. You’re never entirely sure if you’re being conned by Yunior or Junot, neither or both. His fiction also explains why the debate over “likable characters” is not only absurd but destructive; it demeans the author’s creation and insults the reader’s intelligence.

Thanks for writing this, George. I enjoyed reading it.

youre welcome. of course, I only posted it.