The Brief Wondrous Life of OscarWows!

Meet Oscar Wao: an extremely overweight Dominican ghetto nerd with a penchant for fantasy and a jones for the ladies. Born for failure, thanks to the fuku, or family curse, Oscar struggles through life in New Jersey as a social oddity. Expected to be a ladies' man as a birthright, Oscar is a disgrace to his machismo-dominated culture. To cope, he retreats into comic books, Twilight Zone episodes and thousands of pages of his own writings. When enchanted by the beauty of a woman, he comes on strong, in the most aggressively nerdy way possible - like an elephant at a tea party. Oscar's methods of fitting in - taking up jogging to lose weight and secluding himself to nights of wild writing in an attempt to become the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkein - make him the laughing stock and, therefore, subject to even more ridicule. But a trip back to the island reconnects him with his roots and the family fuku, but also spurs the changes he has craved his entire life.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz is as much an American story as it is a Dominican one, as much fantastical as it is real. It's the inner pages - the generational tale of Oscar's mother and grandmother - that let the reader in on the family history, the curse and all the misfortunes that Oscar haplessly was born into. Although we know from the title of Oscar's eventual demise, it doesn't make it any easier that he finds love and finally loses his virginity before falling victim to the fuku.

Junot Diaz's brilliance comes from his lush, but pounding use of language - Spanglish basted in Dominican colloquialism. His heavy-handed prose carves away at the pains of life and history, a machete carving up pieces for all to examine and judge as he or she wishes. The story is revealed and over in an all-too-brief 335 pages. Fresh, energetic and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Junot Diaz's New York Times bestselling brief wondrous life of Oscar wows!