Biblio Reviews

Junot Diaz's  This Is How You Lose Her  (2012) is an eight story collection of machismo and misogyny centered around Yunior, a serial womanizer who is forced to face the consequences of his actions. Never having read Diaz before, I had no idea what to expect, and after reading the epigraph by Sandra Cisneros, I used my knowledge her structure and style from  The House on Mango Street  (1984) to guide me. What ensued was a rather confusing read. Unlike some who found Diaz's use of Spanglish to be the cause of their confusion, the shifting perspective and time in each chapter are what did me in.  This Is How You Lose Her  is similar to  The House on Mango Street  in that Diaz also mixes the Spanish and English, doesn't include quotation marks to clarify speakers in dialogues, has short chapters, and gives insight into the machismo that is familiar in Latino culture. But it is different in that the collection is not fully a cohesive unit and...

One of my all-time favorite TED Talks is 2008 McArthur Fellow and writer Chimamanda Ngoze Adichie's " The Danger of a Single Story ." In her Talk, she makes a case for the importance of publishing varied and numerous stories, particularly about those who historically have been marginalized.  As she brilliantly articulates, the lack of variety and availability of some groups' stories has resulted in "single stories"--stereotypes--about them: "[ S]how a people as one thing,   as only one thing,   over and over again,   and that is what they become." Her concept of "single stories" explains why I have sometimes been...reserved in reading "ethnic" or "urban" literature. A girl gets tired of reading the same type of victimization-type of stories, you know? I find many "ethnic" or "urban" stories to be very limiting and repetitive in setting, plot, and genre. They seem to always be based on reality or...