WANT ONE OF THESE? GET OFFA YOUR ASSES, AND RILE UP THE MASSES!



Junot Diaz is the creative writing professor at MIT. You know what that means, don't you? His whole life is spent reading bad science fiction stories where the science is probably classified by the government, and the stories are probably adverb-rotten clusterfucks that tangle together in a seething knot of dense, technically-correct prose that would get you a perfect SAT score very quickly so that the grader can stop reading and go smoke a tension-cigarette.

And when he isn't reading bad science fiction stories, he is reading stories about nerdy kids getting revenge through extreme, shocking violence. And he must smile, adjust his glasses, and offer incisive criticism and mild praise when it is necessary. To keep his job.

He must even say sometimes: kid, maybe you should ditch that career in building petawatt lasers and cyborg insects that carry anthrax and think about dedicating your life to prose. A hard sell. It is like the guy who has to teach physics at Juilliard.

BUT FUCK ALL THAT: NOW HE IS A PULITZER MAN.

I haven't read this book yet because it still costs twenty bucks or so, you can't steal it from the internet, and it is always checked out of the library.

BUT --

It sounds pretty good:

[from the Times]

"The hero of Junot Diaz's first novel is an overweight Dominican-American man named Oscar, a "ghetto nerd from Paterson, N.J., and a devotee of what he somewhat grandly calls "the more speculative genres." He means comic books, sword-and-sorcery novels, science fiction, role-playing games -- the pop-literary storehouse of myths and fantasies that sexually frustrated, socially maladjusted guys like him are widely believed to inhabit."

A book of our times, I guess. Get it all out, I say.

(The Pulitzer only gets you ten thousand dollars, by the way. That is fucking joke money, in my opinion. The Booker Prize gets you fifty thousand pounds, which is what, a hundred grand nowadays? You can't even take a year off of work at Taco Bell if you win the Pulitzer.)

Comment!

Posted by miracle on Wed, 09 Apr 2008 00:00:33 -0400 -- permanent link