RaveThe San Francisco ChronicleIn his tale of a doomed, overweight young Dominican trundling through existence in New Jersey, all the while working slavishly on a sci-fi opus, Díaz has created a one-of-a-kind novel, a book several years in the making. Oscar Wao revels in its conviction that the intellectual and spiritual quandaries tackled by literature can be perfectly addressed in the voice - part street slang and Spanish, part lyrical and precise English - of a weightlifting lady-killer out of Rutgers … The specificity of Díaz's language and its rhythm are as American as little pink houses for you and me. Yet couching its depiction among working-class Latinos, attending college, no less, is rare in our literature … The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao [is] something exceedingly rare: a book in which a new America can recognize itself, but so can everyone else.
