Description: "This stunning collection of stories offers an unsentimental glimpse of life among the immigrants from the Dominican Republic--and other front-line reports on the ambivalent promise of the American dream--by an eloquent and original writer who describes more than physical dislocation in conveying the price that is paid for leaving culture and homeland behind".--"San Francisco Chronicle".

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Review: Set in the Dominican Republic and urban New Jersey, these slice-of-life stories are about coming of age in two cultures. These gritty, lyrical first-person renderings of childhood and adolescence have all the tunnel vision fragmentation of the world observed through subjective eyes and ears coupled with the universal drift of adolescent emotion, frustration and confusion, with graphic language and situations. The author, born in Santo Domingo and raised in New Jersey, fashions characters and lives that mirror the commonality of American experience while retaining a definite Hispanic cultural distinction and flavor. In stories like "Edison, New Jersey," about a dead-end job, and "Ysrael," on an aimless bus trip, Diaz perfectly captures the nature of adolescence, where nothing seems to happen, yet everything changes. His first collection of short fiction contributes a distinctive voice, one that opens windows onto the elusive nature of the American dream and the struggle to grow up in co...

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