The National Book Foundation announced today that This Is How You Lose Her, the most recent novel by MIT Professor of Writing Junot Díaz, is a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award in Fiction.
Of the book, the Foundation writes:
"On a beach in the Dominican Republic, a doomed relationship flounders. In the heat of a hospital laundry room in New Jersey, a woman does her lover’s washing and thinks about his wife. In Boston, a man buys his love child, his only son, a first baseball bat and glove. At the heart of these stories is the irrepressible, irresistible Yunior, a young hardhead whose longing for love is equaled only by his recklessness―and by the extraordinary women he loves and loses: artistic Alma; the aging Miss Lora; Magdalena, who thinks all Dominican men are cheaters; and the love of his life, whose heartbreak ultimately becomes his own."
The National Book Awards winners will be announced on Nov. 14, at the National Book Awards Ceremony, Cipriani Wall Street, New York City. For information on all the finalists and the National Book Foundation, visit the National Book Foundation website.
Díaz's fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Best American Short Stories. His first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, was greeted with rapturous reviews, including Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times calling it “a book that decisively establishes him as one of contemporary fiction's most distinctive and irresistible new voices.” Diaz received the Pulitzer Prize for Oscar Wao in 2008.
His debut story collection, Drown, published 11 years prior to Oscar Wao, was also met with acclaim; it became a national bestseller, won numerous awards, and has since grown into a landmark of contemporary literature.
