This Is How You Lose Her

Junot Diaz's collection of short stories, "This Is How You Lose Here, is magical. His characters come to life in these stories of lust, love, loneliness, illness and desperation. Despite their circumstances, the characters never lose hope and the ability to dream.

Besides the beauty of Diaz's language and the authenticity of his characters,it is the universality of the themes, which appeal to all of us.

I heartily recommend this collection.

I tried to read the story but the pages are not flowing in correct order. Pages are missing. Pages are duplicated. Paragraphs are repeating. Don't waste your money on download for kindle or other device. It's a mess.

Knowing that Junot Diaz recently won the $500,000 MacArthur award just punctuates this amazing writer. This book weaves you through characters and emotions that at the end makes you relook at everything around you. I could not put the book down and found myself projected into the stories in a way that made me want to "holla" and write myself. The vulnerability Diaz writes with gives a fresh perspective on the immigrant experience and also the colonization of our minds. Wow!!!!!

I hate Yunior. By the end of this book, this guy's life is falling apart because he does not have the ability to be faithful to any woman. Woe is you, buddy. Maybe try respecting women for once? And please take your lame ass out of Boston if you hate it so much. We don't want you here. This author's whole works have been propped up by American Studies departments all over America, who give him a 5 star rating because of his ethnicity. I won't. This is one of those stories that convinces me that the world desperately needs less empathy. Looking around at the other reviewers, I see the same pattern that happens with women who stick in abusive relationships, letting the character's (husband's) past hardships justify the abusive behavior, at least emotionally.

"His father, although not a constant in Yunior's life, set the pattern for that lifestyle early on".

"Still, to dismiss Yunior's crassness and boneheaded machismo would also dismiss the very human portrait that Díaz has created. More importantly, it would dismiss the nuanced portrayal of the outside factors -- culture, sexism, marginalization -- that feed into Yunior's many faults."

"Welcome to the mind, trials, and tribulations of the Dominican man"

Shut up. Dismiss him. Yunior sucks.

I usually don't like books of short stories but I enjoyed this one. Every man in every one of the stories is a shit but there's so much more to it than that. It's a story of culture and politics and discrimination and pain. It's about love and lust and loss. It's one of those books you know you will read again and pickup even more revelations. Bravo Senor Diaz!

A thrilling read that seizes your attention from the first sentence and doesn't let up until the last page. Diaz's stories crackle and hiss with life's sorrows and heartbreaks, ironies and insanity. A book to share with friends, especially those who think they don't enjoy reading. They will love this read, as surely as they'll get sucked up in Yunior's pulsating world of Latin American vida, fantasies and grim realities.

I enjoyed Diaz's descriptions of the Dominican Republic immigrant experiences adjusting to the harsh weather & environment of New York. It is an experience he is deeply familiar with. The story is about all of the failed relationships he has had. I began to wonder why he never figured out that the women would have been happier with a monogamous boyfriend, rather that someone who was sleeping his way through hundreds of women. It became rather depressing.

Great stories. And I was truly looking forward to this newest book by Junot Diaz (2012). But I discovered that I had already read many of the stories (and they were unforgettable). I guess I saw them in the New Yorker. Be forewarned.

I thought Yunior's character seemed a little schizophrenic. He is apparently well-educated (Harvard) and it mentions that he teaches Fiction at the college level. But in the dialogue his use of English grammer is atrocious. Maybe this a
cultural thing among Carribean Islanders, and I just didn't get it, and found it distracting.

Reading this book was a disappointment. Great, if you want a depressing and dreary perspective of relationships and you accept racial/national stereotypes to be the driving factor in an individual's life so much so that it practically overrides all self control and independent action.

Different kind of writing style, much more conversational with a number of spanish phrases. Provides a window on a community and culture that most readers will not be familiar with. Being familiar with life in Latino communities in the US, I asked the question "What's the big deal with this book? I don't understand."

Some decent writing but Pulitzer Prize worthy? C'mon. I'll have to read the Wao one..I just say Diaz does do a heck of a job capturing the youthful DR realism and vernacular and he pulls of writing from a female POV without sounding contrived. One of those books that makes one wish he were Latino or something else besides white so one could produce such literary art and be in the campy know.

This book was chosen for my book club selection. While it sounded interesting, I found it difficult to follow the various characters and plots. Mid-way through the book I was still trying to understand who was who and if/how these stories were connected. I didn't like the slang and the characters were generally not interesting or likeable. At one point I thought I should re-read this book to see if it made sense the second time since there were some many positive reviews but decided the characters just didn't hold my interest enough to spend the time trying to re-read it. I guess it was just not my style of book.

I love Junot's work. Have read and reread much of his writings...

But about 1/3 of the way through I just couldn't take the use of the N-word anymore.

What's interesting is that this comes off much more harsh and disregarding in written word than it does say, a movie. Perhaps that's the magic of books, that the always calculated choice/placement of words can be quite explosive.

I just haven't been able to go back and pick up where I left off... yet (at least).

After hearing Diaz on NPR, I decided, against my better judgement, to try to read this misogynistic book. He is a "Genius" after all. To my disappointment, I began to dislike the main characters and the self-pitying descriptions of them, more with every story. He could have stopped with is brother's sad life as a cautionary tale. Creative language at times. But often the metaphors seemed more for effect than to evoke and emotion.

This is a tremendous book of 9 short stories linked primarily through several non-chronological ages, stages, and pivotal moments of Yunior, the narrator of 'The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.'

About a month before this book was released, I read what was to become (unbeknownst to me) the final story of the book, 'A Cheater's Guide to Love,' in the New Yorker. This piece much self-deprecating humor, but the fragile element of searing, fluctuating-but-always-present, and at times debilitating heartache is woven delicately throughout the years-long time-frame ("the half life of love is forever"). I was darkly moved by this piece during that first reading, but after I read it again at the conclusion of the book, after taking in the other 8 stories, I am left with an impression that is more complex and almost intimate.

I read this for a book club, so it's not the type of story I usually read. I felt the story was very disjointed, and even though I know that was the idea, I felt that it wasn't done well. I also found it hard to enjoy a story when I didn't like the main character.

Really looked forward to reading this book because of it's high rating. Was sorely disappointed. The main character was a piece of scum that just keep repeating his mistakes. Other than that, did not see the point. Sorry

I decided to read this book because the reviews I read either loved or hated it - and the controversy inspired me. Those that disliked the book seem like women who have been hurt by men and couldn't get past how real and wonderful this story is - I loved this book. I recommend it to anyone.

Diaz has once again written a stunningly beautiful (and heartbreaking) book that everyone -- and I mean EVERYONE -- should read. It's sad, it's funny, and it's knock-you-over honest. Don't miss this one.

I have to start saying I am not a very novel reader, I got to the last page, so I have to give some credit, for those novel readers I think it would be great most of it because is not the always love story, if you have time and want to change from what normally you read, this might be a good form of having some entertaining time.

It was a surprisingly easy to read book. Although you will have to had at least some reasonable level of spanish to understand the entire context of the work.
And if you are a man you will definitively identify with at least one story.

It is a book that I will recommend.

The author writes in a way where it is easy to find that you have read through large chunks of the book without really meaning to read that much. But at the same time, I don't get the point of the whole story. If the author is anything like his male protagonists I hope I never have to know him.

Purchased this book because I had seen a quote online that was credited for being in this book. To my dismay, the internet misquoted the quote and it was actually not in this book. However, this was a good read

As a Dominican decent I can totally relate to this book. The world I grew up in was surrounded of men like younior. This book captures the reader at page 1. Very relatable to any culture relatable to any man and any woman. A must read!

the book itself is something I wanted after I saw it in an airport bookstore recently. It came a little corner bent because it was just stuffed in an envelope. there is red pen on the top (thickness of pages area) says "50% off" which was not noted.

I didn't like this book it was very vulgar and wasn't what I had expected. To be honest I wouldn't have purchased this book but it was need for a english class I am in soo... but it isn't that hard of a read I just didn't enjoy it.

This book is about a man's inability to stop womanizing and ruining all his relationships. What makes it unique and a good read is that the author makes the main character seem as though he is writing from the heart. You can feel his pain and sympathize with his shortcomings and the pain he has felt in his life to make him the way he is. Kept me absorbed.

These separate stories are so cleverly connected. There is no need to spell it out to the reader the human product of displacement, parental control, environment that shapes a character. One does not need to know spanish to understand all the Dominican Republic references. The book flows beautifully and upon completions the brilliance of the author comes to light.

Anyone familiar with either of Junot Díaz's previous books will remember Yunior, the Dominican kid coming of age in Drown who goes on to become the narrator of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Back for his third starring role Díaz's work, Yunior is the link connecting most of the stories in This Is How You Lose Her. People who read Oscar Wao got a chance to see how compulsively self-destructive Yunior was in his relationships with women. In This Is How You Lose Her, Yunior's doomed relationships take center stage, as does the tenuous relationship he has with his older brother, Rafa.

It's always an encouraging sign when someone you admire begins something by quoting someone else you very much admire. In this case, the book's epigraph is from the Sandra Cisneros poem, "One Last Poem for Richard." But even better, This Is How You Lose Her opens with one of my favorite short stories, "The Sun, The Moon, The Stars," which was originally published in The New Yorker in 1999. It was written well before readers got to know Yunior in Oscar Wao, but in the story we can already see the effects of his lying and cheating as he tries in vain to earn back his girlfriend's trust.

I had already read a few of the stories in this collection, but reading them all at once and seeing how they fit together was a wholly different experience. One of the most striking things about it was getting to see the way that Yunior's views and his interactions with women were shaped by (and, at times, in response to) his older brother's womanizing ways. In Drown, we got to see a little bit of what Yunior was exposed to as a child; he bore witness to his father's philandering. With his father largely out of the picture in This Is How You Lose Her, it is now Rafa who sets the example for Yunior. While Yunior will never become the abusive person his brother is -- he's often shocked by the cruel ways Rafa treats his girlfriends -- his life experiences, personal traumas, and cultural pressures all have an impact on the way he will eventually begin to treat women.

Then there's the added layer of a cancer story: Rafa fights a losing battle with cancer during some of Yunior's most formative years, but instead of bringing the brothers closer, Rafa shuts everyone out; the loss is something that Yunior reflects on as he gets older. However, the book's cancer story -- and I use "story" here collectively, as Rafa's illness is subtly weaved into several of the stories -- is unlike any other cancer story I've ever read. As with many other difficult topics Díaz has written about, Rafa's battle provides both life-changing and flat-out hilarious moments. There are elements of levity in Rafa's story that I just can't see being told by anyone other than Díaz.

The story's true allure comes from its multiple layers, subtly pulling from both Drown and Oscar Wao in ways that made me want to immediately go back and reread all three of Díaz's books in a row. That last story, "The Cheater's Guide to Love," shows Yunior years down the road. Rocked hard after being (rightfully) dumped by his fiancee, he is finally learning the error of his womanizing ways. The pain of this heartbreak is brutal and sends him spiraling into depression, but it is this emotional rock-bottom that might finally offer Yunior a way out of the hole he's dug himself into.

Since most of the stories feature Yunior, the narrative as a whole is very male-centric. Only one of the stories, "Otravida, Ortravez," features a female point of view; this is also the only story that is not tied in with the others. Still, to dismiss Yunior's crassness and boneheaded machismo would also dismiss the very human portrait that Díaz has created. More importantly, it would dismiss the nuanced portrayal of the outside factors -- culture, sexism, marginalization -- that feed into Yunior's many faults. Ultimately, the book shows that Yunior's way just isn't going to work. It's not sustainable.

Finally, a note on language. Because I saw so much nonsense regarding the Spanglish in Oscar Wao and have already begun seeing nonsense regarding the Spanglish in This Is How You Lose Her, I want to end not with a quote from the book, but with a quote from Gloria Anzaldúa's "Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza":

"So, if you really want to hurt me, talk badly about my language. Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity -- I am my language...Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without always having to translate, while I still have to speak English or Spanish when I would rather speak Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate."

Remember that, because Díaz's playfulness with language is not only legitimate, it's vivid and marvelous. And it's pure Junot.

I thought this was an interesting examination of the Dominican immigrant experience but it overwhelmed me with negative portrayals of the protagonist and the other males. The only story I felt was really hopeful and interesting was the only one narrated by a woman.

This was an amazing book for the view of the latin male to the T. Yes they sure love their mothers, don't they??
Hard to imagine. I cannot express how well written this book is but to ask woman and men to read this and add how they
feel about it!! Love makes you stupid doesn't it??

This is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz

I guess it was bound to happen. All those drugs and bad parenting were supposed to turn Mr. Díaz into a big mess. In "This is how you lose her" we get the living proof of a mind being wasted.....

After his Pulitzer price novel, "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" in 1997, Mr. Díaz has been living off his fame. Unable to write another novel since, he's resorted to just writing short stories. In this collection we can tell why: Mr. Díaz is a sex addict, his students complain that he curses too much, cops are pulling him over for DUI....

In bad Spanglish, Mr. Díaz presents tales of every possible way to screw up a relationship, whether it is with a much older woman, with a "morena" or a "blanquita;" the one common theme is that all end up poorly....

I was very disappointing by his effort. The author uses the second person narration several times and it's very confusing to follow. I found myself bored to death. I just wanted the book to be over.

I don't recommend this book to anyone!

Anyone familiar with either of Junot Díaz's previous books will remember Yunior, the Dominican kid coming of age in Drown who goes on to become the narrator of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Back for his third starring role Díaz's work, Yunior is the link connecting most of the stories in This Is How You Lose Her. People who read Oscar Wao got a chance to see how compulsively self-destructive Yunior was in his relationships with women. In This Is How You Lose Her, Yunior's doomed relationships take center stage, as does the tenuous relationship he has with his older brother, Rafa.

It's always an encouraging sign when someone you admire begins something by quoting someone else you very much admire. In this case, the book's epigraph is from the Sandra Cisneros poem, "One Last Poem for Richard." But even better, This Is How You Lose Her opens with one of my favorite short stories, "The Sun, The Moon, The Stars," which was originally published in The New Yorker in 1999. It was written well before readers got to know Yunior in Oscar Wao, but in the story we can already see the effects of his lying and cheating as he tries in vain to earn back his girlfriend's trust.

I had already read a few of the stories in this collection, but reading them all at once and seeing how they fit together was a wholly different experience. One of the most striking things about it was getting to see the way that Yunior's views and his interactions with women were shaped by (and, at times, in response to) his older brother's womanizing ways. In Drown, we got to see a little bit of what Yunior was exposed to as a child; he bore witness to his father's philandering. With his father largely out of the picture in This Is How You Lose Her, it is now Rafa who sets the example for Yunior. While Yunior will never become the abusive person his brother is -- he's often shocked by the cruel ways Rafa treats his girlfriends -- his life experiences, personal traumas, and cultural pressures all have an impact on the way he will eventually begin to treat women.

Then there's the added layer of a cancer story: Rafa fights a losing battle with cancer during some of Yunior's most formative years, but instead of bringing the brothers closer, Rafa shuts everyone out; the loss is something that Yunior reflects on as he gets older. However, the book's cancer story -- and I use "story" here collectively, as Rafa's illness is subtly weaved into several of the stories -- is unlike any other cancer story I've ever read. As with many other difficult topics Díaz has written about, Rafa's battle provides both life-changing and flat-out hilarious moments. There are elements of levity in Rafa's story that I just can't see being told by anyone other than Díaz.

The story's true allure comes from its multiple layers, subtly pulling from both Drown and Oscar Wao in ways that made me want to immediately go back and reread all three of Díaz's books in a row. That last story, "The Cheater's Guide to Love," shows Yunior years down the road. Rocked hard after being (rightfully) dumped by his fiancee, he is finally learning the error of his womanizing ways. The pain of this heartbreak is brutal and sends him spiraling into depression, but it is this emotional rock-bottom that might finally offer Yunior a way out of the hole he's dug himself into.

Since most of the stories feature Yunior, the narrative as a whole is very male-centric. Only one of the stories, "Otravida, Ortravez," features a female point of view; this is also the only story that is not tied in with the others. Still, to dismiss Yunior's crassness and boneheaded machismo would also dismiss the very human portrait that Díaz has created. More importantly, it would dismiss the nuanced portrayal of the outside factors -- culture, sexism, marginalization -- that feed into Yunior's many faults. Ultimately, the book shows that Yunior's way just isn't going to work. It's not sustainable.

Finally, a note on language. Because I saw so much nonsense regarding the Spanglish in Oscar Wao and have already begun seeing nonsense regarding the Spanglish in This Is How You Lose Her, I want to end not with a quote from the book, but with a quote from Gloria Anzaldúa's "Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza":

"So, if you really want to hurt me, talk badly about my language. Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity -- I am my language...Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without always having to translate, while I still have to speak English or Spanish when I would rather speak Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate."

Remember that, because Díaz's playfulness with language is not only legitimate, it's vivid and marvelous. And it's pure Junot.

I thought this was an interesting examination of the Dominican immigrant experience but it overwhelmed me with negative portrayals of the protagonist and the other males. The only story I felt was really hopeful and interesting was the only one narrated by a woman.

This was an amazing book for the view of the latin male to the T. Yes they sure love their mothers, don't they??
Hard to imagine. I cannot express how well written this book is but to ask woman and men to read this and add how they
feel about it!! Love makes you stupid doesn't it??

This is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz

I guess it was bound to happen. All those drugs and bad parenting were supposed to turn Mr. Díaz into a big mess. In "This is how you lose her" we get the living proof of a mind being wasted.....

After his Pulitzer price novel, "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" in 1997, Mr. Díaz has been living off his fame. Unable to write another novel since, he's resorted to just writing short stories. In this collection we can tell why: Mr. Díaz is a sex addict, his students complain that he curses too much, cops are pulling him over for DUI....

In bad Spanglish, Mr. Díaz presents tales of every possible way to screw up a relationship, whether it is with a much older woman, with a "morena" or a "blanquita;" the one common theme is that all end up poorly....

I was very disappointing by his effort. The author uses the second person narration several times and it's very confusing to follow. I found myself bored to death. I just wanted the book to be over.

I don't recommend this book to anyone!

I found the men in the stories beginning to get monotonous. I probably read four or five stories. Too much sex for sex' sake. It was consistent with the characters but bored me after awhile. I felt bad/sad about the women who where either treated as empty or ignored. Im not a book reviewer but didn't like it.

I am a fan of Junot Diaz, hence I was really looking forward to this particular novel. While the novel was good, it had the potential to be great; leaving me a bit disappointed in the end. There are definitely poignant moments, where I even felt for a not so likable character. But there were also moments where it felt like a repeat chapter, only dressed in a different time frame.

As I said, the novel was good, but it could have been great!

I do love this book - the characters are well-developed and the writing is almost lyrical. BUT - and this comes from an older white woman - the frequent use of the n-word is jarring; I realize that this is a cultural thing, but it takes some getting used to. It would be nice, too, if there was a glossary for the Spanish words - I would hate if they were translated within the text, but this gringa only gets so much from context, and since much of it is slang, literal translation doesn't do it. Nevertheless, this is a great read!

The writing is not for everybody, the author mixes Spanish and English and assumes everybody understand the Dominican Spanish slang. The characters are not likable at all. I would not recommend this book

The first book I read by JD was "The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" - fantastic. I couldn't wait to read the much awaited follow up and even bought it in hardback. What a disappointment. JD should've written this for himself. It was pitiful and painful, and if it is somewhat autobiographical, what a dick! The phrases he used to describe sex are ridiculous and juvenile. If you're trying to choose what book to buy by this author, get the Pulitzer winning BaWLoOW - this one goes to the second hand store.

This is how you loose her is a very funny book, but also a true-to-life novel.It's almost like a trip by poor, uneducated people to their native Dominican Republic, but in all Latin American countries you would find a similar situation and similar people. Being from Brazil I can vouch for the accuracy of it's plot and actors. I have been keeping an eye on Junot's work from the beginning, not so long ago, and I think he has an enormous future as an author. I strongly recommend this book. Lucien

While it might have been impossible to match the brilliance of Oscar Wao, Diaz's new novel doesn't hold a candle to it. The shifting time and perspective of each chapter does nothing to improve a fairly shallow story arc and comparatively thin characters. I'm hoping his third book with redeem him.

Honestly I really like the story but the author's style of writing is really difficult to follow. For one thing, he doesn't use quotation marks. Ever. So it takes effort to figure out who's talking. Also worth note is the author writing in 2 languages simultaneously and since I'm not bilingual I didn't always know what he meant, though context helped. I wouldn't buy this book again though, too much effort to read

Our book group read this this month, and have not met yet. I'm hanging onto a slim hope that someone who is hipper than me can give me a reason that this book has gotten so much praise. There was not a single character that I felt any emotional connection with - in fact, the protagonist was unlikable to the point that there was no sympathizing with him. The title is a good description of the text - be pathologically unfaithful in your 'relationships'. It lost me, indeed.

Amazing story, incredible author. My first Junot novel & I'm hooked. I like how he can make you laugh in one page and then in another he's making think deeply and reminisce on your own life story.

I found it just "okay". I like the language that Junot uses, but I have a hard time following the "who said what" and the characters from story to story. It's almost like I need to read it again to fully understand it. The problem is, I don't really WANT to read it again.

I LOVED the Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. That book pulled me in and made me want to read it over again so that I could get more out of it.

I didn't feel the same pull here.

Just like his other works Drown and TBWLOW this is an amazing book definitely worth buying and reading!!
Easily one of my favorite things about his writing is how he manages to blend in that Spanglish that all 1st gen Hispanic Americans all know( all the more us Dominicans )

This was a book club selection for me. I usually can plow through a book I don't like, but after plowing through 2 chapters I was done. When asking the person who chose this book why she did her answer was we need to read different things. Well this certainly was different. I can read and speak Spanish so that wasn't the problem for me. And I have a few Hispanic friends, both immigrants and first generation so that wasn't the problem for me. It was the terrible lack of culture and tone of the characters. And if you say that is their culture and 177 readers identify with that as culture, well God help the United States. My Hispanic friends have very strong families and REAL culture. They have a mixture from Mexico and assimilation of that of the United States. It is a joy to behold. The characters in this book were so awful that I didn't want to put their "stuff" into my mind. If you are what you eat, then you are to some extent what you read..if TV can poison the mind, what of this book?

Too many character point of view changes with no way of knowing which characters point of view you're reading, confusing, badly written. Would be much better if you know who was who and if there was something to translate the Spanish slang, I had no idea what the heck they were talking about. Plus some of its kinda gross.

Odd collection of short stories around a character who isn't likeable. Written with a lot of ethnic slang that I couldn't understand. Stopped caring about 70 pages in and put it on my donate to Good Will pile.

I could not finish this book as it became tedious to read a boring story about someone's depressing life. I found that I needed to force myself to continue to read as much as I did. I typically finish every book I read but this one was an exception. I did not like it

80 pages in and I had had enough ... the only reason I made it that far was because I was on a flight home from Paris and had nothing else to read ... where is the storyline in this ?! boring boring boring ...

All I can say is: I have a LOT of awful things to say about this book, but I refuse to waste any more time than the already invested in this pathetic piece.. Only decided to add this so my 1 star will help against the great undeserved rates.

I've read several unimportant, lame and boring books, but for the first time in my life I don't finish a one, and yes, I read 3/4 of it hoping for improvement.

i had high expectation for this book, I had read a few quotes online from this author. But the story line was just weird, I feel like it wasn't well written. I gave it 2 stars cause the illustrations were nice and some parts were okay. I probably wouldn't buy another one of his books tho.

I don't know any Spanish nor any Spanish slang, so it was rather frustrating for me trying to read this book. Maybe not knowing the meaning some of the words isn't a big deal but it bothered me. Also, I felt like too much going on with this non-sense sexual relationships... Are people really this much "loose"? Who knows...

I read the sample first. It was ok, so I thought I would give the book a try. I really considered getting my money back for this one. It has the N word over and over and over. Maybe it is a cultural thing, but I didn't understand the misogynistic writing. Don't believe the critics reviews. This book is awful. I read about 30% of it - alot of that was skimming pages. I just couldn't force myself to finish it.

How did this book ever become a best seller and the author so sought after? His treatment of women, to say nothing of his words about women, is base, cruel, self-serving and 15-year old male stuff. Didn't finish it.

Surely American male immigrants from Hispanic nations (in this case, the Dominican Republic) are not as ill prepared to form meaningful relationships with women as this work portrays. I found the demeaning attitudes toward women so disgusting, it made the book difficult to finish. I could never develop positive feelings, much less sympathy for the main character.

Aside from displaying a profound love for his sibling and a graphic description of the hardships endured by immigrants, I found this book, a collection of short stories, totally disrespectful of the female. The language is often unnecessarily distasteful. What was most unacceptable is the male's attitude toward women, including his mother. Is it a cultural anomaly that the female is incapable of learning the English language? Or is it unnecessary? Or perhaps, if she learns the language, then she is liberated---- and "this is how you lose her." Finally, "you lose her," by mistreating her, or treating her like an object. The book is an excellent "how to" manual for any male who wants to be without positive female companionship, but a total "turnoff" for the female reader.
Carole W. Singleton

Loved this book junot Diaz did not dissapoint!!! His characters are real and if ur Hispanic u relate to them and feel their struggles. It's a must read!!!! I devoured it in a day, wish It were longer!!!

This book is a masterpiece of form. Diaz completely changed the way I think about short stories with his first collection Drown, and This is How You Lose Her takes it to another level. His words transported me into a world I had no idea about, and made me feel like I was completely immersed in it.

Everyone should read this book.

This book came hyped up by many reviewers and that did not help it at all. The first 100 pages are some pathetic guy trying to justify his being pathetic, rather than fixing himself. This is the anthem of a sad generation, crying out "It's not our fault" and spending 10 times the energy avoiding blame rather than fixing the issue. I read this right after finishing "A Soldier of the Great War". Go read "A Soldier of the Great War"; it will make you a better person. This book by Diaz will just cost you money and time.

Junot Diaz is breathing fire into the American literary scene. Born in the Dominican Republic but raised in the US since he was six, Diaz brings a fresh experimentation and a definite edge to his writing. Winner of the Pulitzer in 2008 for his first novel, he now sits on the Pulitzer board of jurors at the age of 43. "This is How You Lose Her" is his second volume of short stories, two of which were previously published in the New Yorker (he's had twelve publications in the New Yorker).

Diaz calls his story collection "linked collections ... wonderful Lagrange points between the story collection and the novel," and, indeed, the stories do form a segmented novel. The stories follow the life of a Dominican immigrant, Yunior, from his teenage years until that age of the midlife crisis, stories that chronicle his highly successful, but ultimately failed pursuit of women. He pursues his teaching career and later his writing career as he establishes long-term relationships, but can't stop succumbing to the hunt, as if liaisons are a sport like bowling--all about the score. He goes through gut wrenching regrets when he destroys his relationships and as he ages he begins to see depressing choices.

Shades of Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer" cover the stories. The leading character, Yunior, who tells the story in the first person, appears to be Diaz (much like Miller in Cancer): a Dominican the same age, growing up in Jersey, teaching in Boston. Yunior tells the stories in a modern, raw, profane, conversational slang sprinkled with the Spanish idioms of the neighborhood, as if told to a buddy over a beer, yet the prose flows smoothly unlike some young writers whose conversational narrative is choppy, irritatingly destroying the flow of the story. Like Miller, he seems to be telling his own story, part autobiography, part fiction, without Miller's stream of consciousness, but with some of Miller's didactic social criticism and subtle philosophical musing.

Even though Diaz writes the stories from the perspective of a Dominican immigrant, his stories are about the young, solipsistic American males who are drawn to the pursuit of conquest at a young age and never quite grow up, who never grasp any philosophical purpose to their self-centered lives until approaching middle life begins to gnaw at them, and they begin to see their emptiness and lack of connection to their communities.

Diaz brings together a moving philosophical reflection and heartbreaking social criticism. While on a trip to the D.R. with his equally two-timing drinking buddy, Yunior bonds with a Dominican child about the same age (six) as Yunior (Diaz) when he moved with his parents to Jersey. The boy was the child of a desperate teenager in the worst of third-world, tin shack, cardboard ghettoes, possibly even pimped by her brother. Yunior, nearing middle-age, spends the day with the boy, playing, gaining his trust. But determinism dooms the boy. Only by chance can he ever escape his destiny. Yunior sees both his buried emotional need for a child and the child's doomed, fatalistic future. "You are suddenly overcome with the urge to cover him with your arms. The boy holds on to you tightly. There is no significance in this, you tell yourself. The boy is staring at you with lapidary intensity."

I mean really, this book is not what I expected. I have to say, if you are of latin heritage the lingo may make more sense to you. As an Englishwoman, I wasn't following. I also found it to be dragged out, countless stories of a man who represents everything women hate about men. Maybe the ending saves the book but the parts I read? I couldn't stomach it long enough to find out.

I was very disappointed in this book. I think it was overrated and far fetched. I ended up reading the entire thing - not sure why. I can never get those hours back. Would definitely NOT recommend.

Confession: Junot Diaz's novel "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" for which he was awarded the Pulitzer is the only Pulitzer-winning novel in the past many years I simply could not get through. And I tried twice. But that has not been true at all of his shorter fiction; and "This Is How You Lose Her" is indeed a wonderful reading romp. I have used some of his writing that appears occasionally in The New Yorker to show my college students, most of whom as Hispanics (I live in Miami Beach), that English is not a pure language, that great contemporary writers who themselves are immigrants sprinkle in their native language. And no one does it better than Junot Diaz in my opinion.
Most of the stories are narrated by Yunior. Belief it or not that is a rather common name, especially for Cubans and Dominicans, or so it seems from my experience. Yunior and his brother Rafa have, on the whole, been brought up by Mami (their mother), starting in their native Dominican Republic and then moving to New York City.
I have several favorite stories in this collection. One "Invierno" (winter) that is near the end depicts the family reunited. Papi has been working for five years in NYC. And finally he has found a house in a horrid neighborhood, of course, and brought his wife and the two sons up. In the winter!! And instead of going to school, they huddle in front of the TV which is where Mami says they will learn English. But Papi says to never mind that, they should leave English to him: "It's best if I take care of English" soon followed by "Besides, the average woman can't learn English."
As I noted above, I live in South Beach. In the first story, "The Sun, the Moon, the Stars" the narrator has finally convinced his American-based girlfriend Magda to go with him to the DR. She does so reluctantly. And dislikes very much staying with abuelo (grandfather). So they check into a hotel. And the narrator writes: "Every fifty feet there's at least one Euro... [I have to edit this] beached out on a towel like some scary pale monster that the sea's vomited up." Amen!
But there there are the tear-producing stories such as "Otra Vida, Otra Vez." Here is how that story begins with this great combination of second person/first person: "You, Yunior, have a girlfriend named Alma, who has a long tender horse neck and a big Dominican ass that seems to exist in a fourth dimension beyond jeans."
Rafa is a fascinating character who seems to embody all the stereotypes of a Dominican living in NYC but who just isn't at all that stereotype. He is Mami's favorite in spite of all the things he does--and he also has cancer--because she lost two babies before him and almost lost him as well. Anyway, in "the Pura Principle" Mami has a new man--only he's not what you are thinking: She is very busy, working, cooking, cleaning, worrying about her sons. "Lady [Mami] still managed to scrounge a couple hours here and there to hang with her new main man, Jehovah. I had my yerba, she had hers. She'd never been big on church before, but as soon as we landed on cancer planet she went so over-the-top Jesucristo that I think she would have nailed herself to a cross if she'd had one handy. That last year she was especially Ave Maria. Had her prayer group over to our apartment two, three times a day. The Four Horsefaces of the Apocalypse, I called them." (Yerba is weed although you could easily figure it out.)
Yes! This collection of stories is that good.
I think it is wonderful when stories get sprinkled--sometimes in Junot Diaz's case, splattered--with other languages. He tosses in Creole and I ever found a couple of Russian words!
One leaves the book, reluctantly in my case, with such a good feeling about all the characters, even the ones you would never want living in your neighborhood!

I haven't read it yet but I'm a Junot Díaz fan and really enjoyed his other two books. I also saw him read in Monterey and found him very engaging. There aren't as many illustrations as I would have like or expected but if you're a book nerd you will appreciate this edition. If special editions don't interest you, get the paperback version for less money.

What a waste of time! It shouldn't be considered literature by any stretch of any imagination.

It is vapid, linguistically redundant and at the same time, affected and phony. Stringing together an abundance of profanity for no purpose, along with racist cliches, hardly rises to the level of plot and character development.

Ugh!

I did not like this book at all. I didn't appreciate the author's writing as basically he's insulting to Dominican men, women and his language is too vulgar throughout. I am not Dominican but found him very insulting to his people nevertheless. I don't understand how he won a Pulitzer.

I forced myself to finish the book, as it was chosen by my book club. I can't recall anything interesting or uplifting, and none of the characters are appealing or have learned anything through their experiences. I recommend this book to anyone who has nothing better to do with their time. There are so many negatives, I don't know where to start. But why bother explaining. And as for professional critics' reviews -- I will no longer believe any of them, as most will find something positive in everything they read.

This book did not give any new or interesting insight into NYC and growing up as an immigrant front the Dominican Republic. Honestly I found the book misogynistic and difficult to read. I kept hoping it would come together in the end but it never did.

I had trouble getting through this book because of the vulgar language and situations. I was just surprised because I had seen so many glowing reviews in various publications. To each their own--I just do not really see what the reader can get out of these stories. They could possibly be insights into the mind of someone who habitually cheats and makes bad decisions, but there just didn't seem to be much there. I would rather have spent my time reading one of the many other books on my "to read" list.

You've probably read books where you must occasionally stop and say "Wow, where did he come up with that turn of phrase?"

This is one of those books. Like "Drown" and "Oscar Wao," "This is How You Lose Her" is magical, kinetic, life-affirming, sad, riotous and nostalgic, sometimes all within the same story. But most of all, it's the writing - the kind you can savor and simply wonder "where he came up with that" time and again. I read the entire book in an evening, and plan to re-read it immediately. In sum, if you've read other works by Junot Diaz, you know what to expect.

I have heard some critics blast the book for its raunchiness. Well, so be it. It's no more raunchy than, say, "The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love" or some of Philip Roth's novels. I did not find it bothersome in the least.

So, if you enjoy the thrill of language, or if you simply enjoy reading well-crafted and interesting stories, do give this a try. I hope you enjoy it.

I could not wait to finish this book! Only because it is my book club selection for this coming month, and I wanted to be able to
critique it intelligently. I HATED this book! For me, all of the hoopla surrounding this author is what is wrong with contemporary
fiction today. These are all stories I could have done without. I could not muster any interest or empathy for any of the characters,
except perhaps a few secondary profiles, like the mother of the two brothers. I felt sorry for her. I DID learn something: Every
conceivable crass way to refer to one's sexual body parts in two languages. Again, I could have done without it.

I gained nothing for my time invested in this book, except perhaps a general awareness that too many people can be brought
down by their circumstances, but fall far short of caring, either...

Having devoured and celebrated The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and given it to many friends and family, I was eagerly looking forward to Junot Diaz's new book. The New Yorker ran the final story of this new collection last month, and it was TERRRIFIC. I was SALIVATING. Well. To get straight to it, most of the rest of the stories in this collection are FLAT, and lacking in energy and the inventive use of language and pacing that made Diaz his name and got him his recent MacArthur award. These stories are MEDIOCRE. SO disappointing. The story The Pura Principle is perhaps an exception, but even when writing about his brother's cancer and death Diaz falls into long passages of one dimensional dull narrative. Where is the Yunior we all came to know and love ? Has success ruined Junot Diaz ?

Very disappointing read. This is a compilation of self indulgent male whining. Accounts of one's bad behavior do not make literature. Diaz owes an apology for his unabashed chauvinism or rather should just go crawl in a hole.

This is a book about love and struggle, as characterized by Dominican immigrants to the States. Diaz can turn out sentences, situation, psychology and character beautifully. In the end, however, the book's messages are just so much banality - 'Cancer is Sad', 'Philandering Can Get A Man In Trouble' and so on. Nothing too deep here but perhaps enough profundity to keep the uninformed happy.

I was disappointed by this book. It wasn’t what I expected by a long shot, despite the overflow of good press it received. I didn’t find it inspiring or impressive like so many did. I stumbled upon it as a result of my reader/writer friends on tumblr who raved about it’s poignant moments and repeatedly quoted it in their blogs.

They were right, of course, about one thing. This book does have some rather poignant moments. At times, I even found myself in tears relating to some of the experiences described by the author. But aside from a few quotes and a few moments of emotion on my end, I found this book incredibly mediocre. It fell short of all the small expectations I’d developed as a result of the praise it had gotten.

It felt like a summary.

Now, I’m an avid supporter of the show, don’t tell aspect of writing. Often times when I offer editing services to writers and friends, one of the most important critiques I will give them when I read their story is to take places where they have dragged on with these incredibly dull talking moments in their writing and turn it into something with dialogue, something with action. It is what I would have told this author, if given the chance.

The main character in this ultimately became a person I just hated. I couldn’t get on board with his personality, I found nothing likable about him. I didn’t respect this character, this man. I found him somewhat pathetic, in fact, and considered the possibility that he may have truly deserved the pain he put on himself.

I found it a bit fascinating how this character had everything wrong with his life, but didn’t manage to pull any sympathy from me for it. It was an interesting read, but I don’t think it was a great book. I expected different things, a more likable character for one. I was disappointed with what I found.

This is How You Lose Her didn’t do what it should have done. For me, the summary aspect and a character I hated, but couldn’t love hating, ruined it.

*Would not read again.
*Not for me, but for others.
*Ugh character.
*1/5

Pick any one of the short stories in This Is How You Lose Her and you get exactly what Junot Diaz has had to say in everything he's written for almost 20 years: (1) Dominican men are sex-crazy misogynist sucios that bone anything; (2) Dominican women are either religiosas who don't give it up or sucias who exist to give it up; (3) Some Dominican men feel bad about their infidelities, some don't; (4) Dominican women feel bad about infidelities but not enough to stop them; (5) Dominican men are crap parents but Dominican women aren't; and (6) the experience of transitioning from a third world country to America is strange, stressful and difficult for young Dominicans. That's it, no joke. The book is like a collection of b-sides from the singles album that was Drown, Diaz's first book.

In Brief Life of Oscar Wao Diaz said all the same things, but since it was a novel he had more space to flesh out the characters and storyline, allowing him to move past the stereotypes and present a really compelling narrative. In TIHYLH, Diaz just reverts back to the tools of his trade. He writes really well, his dialogue is interesting, the stories are never boring, the descriptions of places and events are vividly evoked. If this is your first Diaz book, you'll likely be favorably impressed. But, as a follow up to the tremendous Oscar Wao, see (1) - (6) above.

Diaz has a new novel coming out soon, so here's hoping it's a leap forward. Someone who writes this well doesn't need to pigeonhole himself as a Dominican writer. He's good enough to be known as a great writer and should just get on with that.

Nine sharp tales that tease out the title of this collection. Diaz brings back Yunior, the narrator of his Pulitzer-winning novel "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao", in these stories. In each of them, set mostly in New Jersey, as did the novel, Diaz draws attention to the working class Latino society, where first- and second- generation immigrants from the Dominican Republic navigate the unwieldy waters of courtship, sex, marriage and every other kind of man-woman relationships in-between.

Most of the tales have the men as focalisers and/or narrators, and Yunior and his older Brother Rafa appear in a number of them. Yunior is something of a would-be-stud, modelling himself after the boxer-slash-stud Rafa, who is not above bundling his girlfriends down to the basement bedroom he shares with Yunior for a night of passion, while their Mami is presumably oblivious to the shenanigans in her house. Yunior himself flits from girl to girl but it is with some tenderness that he documents the loss of a relationship (often due to his own promiscuity), and his attempts to salvage or get over it, especially in "The Sun, The Moon, The Stars" and "The Cheater's Guide to Love", the latter featuring him as an adult.

It is however the story of the boys as new immigrants in the States, "Invierno", that moves me. Diaz lays bare the bewilderment of the children at their new environment and the silent determination of their mother, Mami, who wants to believe that the life her husband and the children's Papi has given them, is and will be better, despite being trapped in their apartment as the wintry days wear on. By the end of that story, she has unravelled somewhat and a part of her is lost. This understanding casts a different light (retrospectively) on the story just before this, "The Pura Principle", in which the boys are grown and their Papi no longer around. Even when Mami was coping with another family tragedy, Yunior says: "My mom wasn't the effusive type anyway, had one of those event-horizon personalities - s*** just fell into her and you never really knew how she felt about it. She just seemed to take it, never gave anything off, not light, not heat". It's no wonder, when one considers the younger and more hopeful woman that she once was in the later story, is now much hardened.

With Diaz's (by now) trademark wit and lively language (an intoxicating blend of 'Spanglish' and colloquial lingo), this deceptively slim collection packs quite a punch with its unconventional take on relationships.

Diaz apparently says that his work is pointing to the sexism of his male protagonists, not excusing it. Unfortunately, while he may, on some level, "get" that these characters are sexually exploitative misogynists, the stories, being told almost exclusively from their perspective, don't give you a sense of the effect of these sexist attitudes and behavior on anyone but the protagonists, who wallow in self-pity over the fact that they constantly sabotage relationships by being unfaithful. And then you have to buy that the female characters, seen purely from the outside, are somehow realistic, but they often seem to come more from a narcissistic teenage boy's fantasy than from reality--"Alma" is a particularly egregious example.

It doesn't all come down to that, of course. It's a varied set of stories, and I found some to be moving and insightful--particularly "Invierno."

Junot Diaz is becoming one of my favorite authors. But, this book was not for me.

After the home run novel - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao [to which he won a Pulitzer and more] - it should be understood that his next novel would not be as good. That is life. Even Hank Aaron rarely hit one out after his first homer hit in a game.

And, the personality/main character of this book is something of a Dominican Woody Allen. Maybe not as twitchy. Maybe not as nerdy. But, Portnoyed-sex driven with questionable taste for others' feelings make this latino's perspective of women as brazen as beat generation Jack Kerouac. And, that is neither an honor nor a small feat.

One passage in the book almost says it all. "Both your father and your brother were sucios. S#$@t, your father used to take you on his pussy runs, have you in the car while he ran up into the cribs to bone his girlfriends. Your brother was no better, boning girls in the bed next to yours. Sucios of the worst kind and now it's official: you are one, too. You had hoped the gene missed you, skipped a generation, but clearly you were kidding yourself." After more than 200 pages about this young man's conquests interests you - buy the book. Otherwise, you may want to pass.

Interestingly, my last review was too filled with prednisone for this reader. This is probably too testosterone for most female readers.

Like the television show "Oz" or the movie "The Big Lebowski", you will have trouble finding flocks of women wanting to read about a kid jumping from abusive relationship to abusive relationship with women.

The man can write. And his collage of English with Spanish slang makes his style something new, which will soon become normal as the languages converge with population infusion.

If you finish the book and love it. Great. If you finish the book and wonder WTF? I warned you.

I always fall in love with Diaz's books and this was no exception. Yunior continues to be one of the funniest, sharpest and most melancholically self-aware characters in contemporary fiction.

These stories are anchored around concerns of infidelity and failed romance, but Diaz's scope is as ferocious as ever: the cultural displacement of being an immigrant in America, the even bigger displacement when you return 'home', the grudgingly difficult, often destabilized home and work lives of a minority working class we depend on but never truly accept, etc.

Those are some brooding topics but Diaz's voice is so searinglu smart, and so consistently funny that the moments of sad clarity hit with force. I've spent the last several years working as a high school teacher in poor minority communities and seeing some of the issues my students have faced reflected so intensely here made reading this all the more poignant. Highly recommended.

From the title, it's clear that each of the short stories will end in heartbreak. Even though readers are aware of this from the start, the deterioration of each relationship will hit you. Themes that are common throughout Diaz's work reappear in these stories: machismo/masculinity, latinidad, the grittiness of North Jersey, (im)migration, blackness as it exists (or is resisted) in Dominican culture, misogyny, lust, complicated love, loss, etc. The stories aren't told in a linear fashion (since when has Diaz ever used linear plots anyway?). All are told from Yunior's perspective with the exception of "Otravida, Otravez." That story follows Dominican immigrant Yamin's life as a laundrywoman in a hospital and her complex relationship with her married lover. The language is a melange of Dominican Spanish and Black English (far less Sci-Fi speak than The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao). All of the stories are heavy, but the text is far from dense. I enjoyed the first and last stories the most, "The Sun, the Moon, the Stars" and "The Cheater's Guide to Love". It's quite befitting that the bookends are the most nuanced pieces.

This is my first Junot Diaz book and it won’t be the last, I absolutely loved the story, from the moment I started I found myself completely invested in the characters and everything around them.

Junot vision of the story is a very realistic one, it is not embellished with unnecessary beautiful moments, this story is what it is and the characters are very flawed just like in real life, he made me feel not a spectator but a participant in the story.

The way he describes the lives of people who go to the US searching for a better and different life that what they had back home is just honest and raw, I’ve never been in s situation like that but he made me feel a part of it, he made me feel pride to be a latina and he also made me realize how hard it is for people to adjust to a new life, we see it with Yunior’s mother, how she doesn’t talk English, how she wants good Dominican girls for her sons, how she is sad at the beginning to find herself in such a different world.

It also made me see all these divisions between the Latino community, and how even within the community there are still sort of rules about who you hang out with or form a relationship with and how there are a lot of stereotypes that we ourselves perpetuate without even realizing it.

I really enjoyed the book, it went by too fast because the writing was beautiful, it flowed and it made me lose control of how fast I was reading.

This is how you write it - you take a scintillatingly talented writer, you focus in on a Lothario who is unmoored from any healthy attachments, and then you write an achingly beautiful book that knocks the socks off the reader with its astuteness and authenticity.

In this interwoven collection of short stories, the immensely gifted Junot Diaz revisits Yunior, the narrator of his previous short story book, Drown. Right from the start, he grabs the reader's attention: "I'm not a bad guy. I know how that sounds - defensive, unscrupulous - but it's true. I'm like everyone else - weak, full of mistakes, but basically good."

By the end of the book, the reader is inclined to agree. Yunior is pitiful but never deigns to be self-pitying. He is highly sexually charged but impotent in emotional consistency. He is incredibly self-aware yet at the end of the day, always falls victim to his "lying cheater's heart."

Take this passage, when Yunior's girlfriend reads his journal and finds visible proof of his cheating: "Instead of lowering your head and copping to it like a man, you pick up the journal as one might hold a baby's beshatted diaper, as one might pinch a recently benutted condom. You glance at the offending passages. Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until he day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel. This is how you lose her.

Junot Diaz writes like a dream, adeptly mixing the testosterone-charged prose with poetic insights. His emotionally abusive father and cancer-stricken older brother - both role models in the most negative of ways - are presented as background. At the end of the day, this is a book about love: not how to maintain it but how to soldier on when love cannot be claimed.

Consisting of nine short stories, all of which are about love, This is How You Lose Her describes whole worlds within the title itself. Four of the stories are named for the speaker's lovers, and all of them reflect the speaker's inability to experience love on a plane higher than that of the physical, which drives every aspect of the speaker's life. With Yunior, who appeared in Diaz's first story collection, Drown, and in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, as a speaker in many of these stories, the narratives move back and forth in time, and for anyone who has read the biography of the author in Wikipedia or elsewhere, they become almost spooky in their closeness to the biography of the author himself.

Many settings parallel those in which Diaz himself lived, beginning with his initial arrival from the Dominican Republic with his mother and brother, and their stay in New Jersey with a father/husband they have not seen in five years. Later references place him in Brooklyn, at Rutgers, and finally in Cambridge and Boston where he is working for his PhD. The intense feelings aroused by these vividly described settings suggest that other aspects of Yunior's life may also parallel that of the author. As the speaker, be it Yunior (the author's apparent alter-ego) or some other character, moves from one unsuccessful relationship to another in these stories, the reader cannot help but feel sorry for the degree to which hopes are dashed and women are used (willingly in most cases) and later hurt as a result of the male character's insensitivity and ignorance of what he might have done wrong.

Throughout the collection, the various speakers reflect their fondness for Santo Domingo and their Dominican heritage, sometimes noting with affection their "blackness" in comparison to the lighter complexions of some of the women they meet. Even when these women are Spanish-speaking, some notation usually appears indicating what other country these woman may have come from, along with the differences in their cultures. Having been exposed to many different cultural groups and many kinds of slang during his childhood and adolescence, Diaz incorporates Spanish street slang, obscenities in multiple languages, and the offensive anatomical colloquialisms of "male-speak" frequently heard in hip-hop and hard rock, in contrast to the very different language of academia. All these "languages" combine here into an unusual "stew" which gives vibrancy and a sense of real life to the dialogue.

None of these slang terms are translated for those who do not share the speaker's background, however, and though they add color and atmosphere, and perhaps, even humor for those who do understand the jargon, they can be frustrating for those who do not. The changes of point of view from speaker to speaker, with the author occasionally interjecting himself into the story, sometimes prevent a reader from identifying closely with particular characters, though the fate of Rafa, Yunior's brother, is sadly memorable, however briefly it may be discussed in the stories. Ultimately, I came to appreciate the author's style and the almost naïve intensity with which he recreates stories of love and loss and lessons learned (maybe) along with his hopes for the future.

This Is How You Lose Her was my first experience of Junot Diaz's writing and I found it took some getting used to. The complexities of Yunior's life and the way he navigates between very different environments from inner city to Ivy League college campus makes for interesting reading. Diaz draws out very clearly the difficulties of a life in transition where the lead character does not feel “at home” anywhere. Yunior struggles similarly with his relationships which are further complicated by the increasingly damaging circumstances in which people close to him find themselves. By the end, Diaz brings the reader full circle both emotionally and in understanding.

Junot Díaz's This Is How You Lose Her, a nine-story collection, is the author's follow-up to his 2008 Pulitzer-winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Seven of the stories were first published in The New Yorker between February 1998 and July 2012, one in Glimmer Train in 1998, and another in Story in 1999.

Reading these stories in the order in which they are presented here, one after the other, will be a greatly different experience than that had by those who read them over the fourteen-year period during which they first appeared in print. This Is How You Lose Her, in fact, reads more like a novel than it does a short story collection. This is because all of the stories, although they flip back and forth between segments of his life, feature the same central character already familiar to readers of Díaz's two previous books. Yunior, a young Dominican, along with his mother and older brother, came to the United States when he was just a boy, and these stories, in addition to telling how Yunior got here, detail what happened to him once he did.

Be forewarned that these stories, insightful as they often are, are written in a raw, sometimes outrageous, style. Díaz writes in a Hispanic street vernacular that sees him often mixing Spanish words into his sentences. And, even though entire sentences are sometimes presented in Spanish, Díaz leaves it up to non-Spanish speaking readers to figure out what he is saying based on the context of the rest of the paragraph. But that is the least of it.

Yunior is a womanizer, and he comes by it naturally. His father, although not a constant in Yunior's life, set the pattern for that lifestyle early on, leaving Yunior to learn all the moves by watching his older brother in action. His is the kind of macho culture in which women are primarily objects to be sexually exploited, and Yunior describes in explicit terms what he gets from the women who briefly pass through his life.

Some might find Yunior's language offensive, but it is exactly this style and language that make Díaz's stories as powerful and effective as they are. However, one does begin to wonder how long such a distinctive style can be mined before it goes stale for the reader. Even though this is my first experience with Junot Díaz's work, I already wonder how much more of it I can read before the style becomes tiresome. Díaz is definitely on my radar now, but I am more likely to wait for something new from him written in a different voice than I am to seek out either of his two earlier books.

This Is How You Lose Her is a book about heartbreak - and the very macho central character, surprisingly enough, suffers much of it himself.

This is a work that will turn off folks with a distaste for profanity. For me, while I appreciate explicit writing, I felt the narrators were juvenile in their use of descriptions, and it all felt like a checklist for how bold and rash it could eventually be. The best story, "Otravida, Otravez," was narrated from a woman's perspective and presented the hardships of immigration, relationships and infidelity. It lacked the crude descriptions of women and sex, and that's probably why I appreciated it more. Perhaps that story is less "Diaz-esque," but I would like to read more work from him that incorporates the Latin-American perspective without the constant prose about explicit sex. It would be different if I felt any compassion for the characters, but it just didn't do anything for me. All in all, I can still recommend this book for "Alma," the previous story I mentioned, and "The Cheater's Guide to Love."

This is a collection of short stories starring Yunior, a Dominican immigrant who forges a path through his life that is different from that of his father and older brother, but is also impacted by them. Yunior is not quite an anti-hero, but rather like that old friend you have from high school who you wish would make more of himself but instead keeps on falling into the same old traps and never quite learning his lesson.

Yunior's weakness is fidelity. Growing up and seeing his father and older brother as men who cheat on their wives and girlfriends with no regret, he unwittingly incorporates their path into his own. His path involves going to college and becoming a professor, dreams that were unimaginable to his father and older brother, but his path is littered with the corpses of relationships that he destroyed with his philandering. He promises to do better, but he never does. It's surprisingly early that he makes the mistake that will ultimately cause him to lose his fiancée.

These interconnected stories about Yunior, with a digression to a laundress that casts some illumination into the world of Dominican immigrant women, show him growing up, making his way through the world, dealing with the slow and painful death of his older brother due to cancer, and making all of the same relationship mistakes over and over again. The stories are sad, hopeful, and funny. Several times, after I completed one, I had to put the book down and let the story soak in. Some needed to be re-read immediately, others (such as the pivotal moment that causes him to lose her) needed to be re-read to better understand later events.

The stories use Yunior's dialect, the Dominican-flavored Spanglish. It's not difficult to follow, even if your Spanish is as basic as mine, but I have to admit that I had to go look up words sometimes to get the full flavor of the story. I never minded the short diversion to learn a new word. Diaz's use of dialect, especially the way that it shifted depending on who Yunior was talking to, made the story ring even more true to me. We all choose our words based on our audience; Yunior's was more obvious due to its inherent bilingual nature.

Some of these stories have been published before, but they mean so much more in the context of the whole book. It's often true that the whole is more than the sum of the parts, and that's certainly true for this collection of short stories. If you have read some of the stories before, don't skip them in this collection: you'll have a different appreciation of them in their new context. If you have read Diaz's previous books, Drown or The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, you've already been introduced to Yunior. If you haven't read Diaz's previous work, this book stands alone, although I think you'll find yourself wanting more of Diaz's eye for detail and gift for a haunting turn of phrase that perfectly captures a moment or a feeling.

This month, my book club chose to read Junot Diaz's This is How You Lose Her. I truly hated this book, possibly more than any other piece of literary fiction I have ever read. I found it vile and disgusting. The novel revolves around Yunior, a domincan man, who destroys all of his relationships with women by cheating on them. Each chapter of the novel reads like a short story, and some of those stories center on Yunior's friends and family members, and how they destroy their own relationships with infidelity. Through Yunior, Diaz essentially purports that all Latino men cheat; that it is ingrained in their culture and bred into their blood. Diaz's female characters are under-developed and often portrayed as desperate and shrill. The text is also layered with every revolting Spanish slang term for the female body that one can imagine, in an effort to be authentic. It seemed to me that Diaz was trying too hard, and the dialogue came across as disingenuine instead. What was more offensive, however, is the portrayal of his male characters as unilateraly adulterous and weak. Regardless of familial background, education, and financial status the men in this novel are Latino, and thereby, incapable of monogamy. It was an incredibly demoralizing glorification of misogyny, although Diaz tries to cover that by portraying Yunior as lonely and remorseful in the end.

I had mixed feelings about this one. This is my first Junot Diaz book, and I realize now skimming over some of the other reviews that this book features a protagonist from previous books. That being said, it reads almost like a collection of vignettes, all (or most) featuring a single male protagonist and his doomed love life. I liked how the male protagonist evolves and how the different facets of his personality are revealed. He's so authentic, unapologetically imperfect, he reads like a real person with the ways he talks, thinks, and comes to conclusions. Even with all his indiscretions and failings, you can't help but root for him and feel emotionally invested in his plight, though I personally had trouble connecting with him until the latter half of the book. ...But what was with the random lady with the married lover? While that story was interesting, I really resented it when I realized it was kind of tossed in there because I kept expecting the characters would tie in more than a purely thematic way. They didn't, or I completely missed the connection. It would have made more sense if it was either related to the rest of the book or if every vignette featured different characters.

As for the Spanish components... I understand that Diaz is maintaining authenticity by not keeping everything in English and not restricting the Spanish to simple, accessible words. I like that extra degree, but at times it's difficult to empathize because I have no idea what's being said. I don't dislike that Diaz interspersed Spanish and Dominican culture into the book; I just wish that he had provided some sort of glossary at the end because it really disrupts the reading process having to switch from book to computer every other sentence. Some of the words I couldn't even find a suitable translation for and context wasn't enough to help me decipher what was meant. Instead of inviting me into this world and culture, I felt locked out. Yes, it may seem like small details, but since every other sentence features Yunior's unique melding of the languages, these missed details add up over the course of the book.

Infidelity is a major theme of Junot Diaz's 2012 short story collection, This is How You Lose Her. If this was merely a recitation of the different ways in which men cheat on their women--and there's a lot of that in the nine stories--it would be pretty unremarkable. But Diaz offers much more than A Cheater's Guide to Love, the title of the last story.

Many of the stories center on Yunior, the character Diaz introduced in his earlier short story volume, Drown, and reprised in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Yunior, often described as Diaz's alter ego, is a wonderful character--a young man who wants to do right, but is caught between his upbringing and his internal moral compass.

In Yunior's world, the men cheat on their women. He watched his father, Papi, cheat on his mother, and his brother, Rafi, cheat on women, often in the bedroom the brothers shared. In "Miss Lora" Yunior as a teen ponders this as he lusts after an older woman. "You had hoped the gene missed you, skipped a generation, but clearly you were kidding yourself." These little asides to the reader, as if he is a confidante of the character, are a hallmark of Diaz's work.

What gives these stories of heartbreak and betrayal buoyancy is Diaz's shimmering prose, a unique blend of scintillating narrative, Spanglish and street lingo. Diaz writes with an energy and intimacy that keeps the reader invested in the story.

"Invierno," one of the best stories, describes the arrival of Yunior's family from the Dominican Republic to a gritty urban locale in northern New Jersey. Papi won't let Yunior or his older brother, Rafi, leave their small apartment, but toward the end of the story, their mom takes them out during a snowstorm, viewing things they'd never seen in their homeland. "We even saw the ocean, up there at the top of Westminster, like the blade of a long,curved knife. Mami was crying but we pretended not to notice. We even threw snowballs at the sliding cars and once I removed my cap just to feel the snowflakes scatter across my cold, hard scalp."

The collection ends with a story in which Yunior has an epiphany. Cheating on a woman he truly loved, Yunior's heart burns when she breaks up with him. It takes him years and he still is not over her. And that's when he realizes, in Diaz's beautiful words, "The half-life of love is forever."

"The world, you tell yourself, will never end."

I love this title and I like the concept. Relationships you eff up, what went wrong and when and how it started to deteriorate, and how you can get pretty good at being lousy. Universal themes of loss, heartbreak, dysfunction and failure. "The Sun, the Moon, the Stars," "The Pura Principle," and "Miss Lora" were the highlights for me.

What really elevates this from being merely a heartless recital of bad, broken romances, mostly perpetuated by our cheater narrator, is Díaz's distinct cultural and regional voice . Yunior, a Dominican American, articulates himself with a kind of casual fluidity, naturally mixing in Spanish phrases and lingo with honest and perceptive reflections. Often sentences begin with verbs ("Broke my heart." "Felt real personal.") and I loved the tone that created - genuine, inevitable, defeated but resigned. The language itself mirrors the overarching sentiment of the collection: "the half-life of love is forever." Whatever Yunior feels in present day, his past always lingers and none of it is insignificant.

This doesn't get a full 4 stars because I didn't always connect with it. I wasn't infatuated with the characters or the romantic episodes that break down into 9 stories. Yunior's a serial cheater. An intellectual serial cheater, but still, a cheater, and like the attitude and lifestyle of a cheater some of the stories felt too transient and emotionally detached. It was hard to care about people when most of them move in and out of the main character's life within the span of 20 or 30 pages. I wanted more characters to truly matter, beyond his family. I like Díaz's style, but I guess I wanted more complexity (and no, saying, but they're only short stories isn't a proper defense. Alice Munro just won the Nobel prize and all her stories are like mini novels. It can be done). Nevertheless I look forward to reading more of his work.

I really liked this book! The way that it was written was very personable, like you could hear him speaking in your head. The imagery was great as well. I really enjoyed the way love was shown in a real form, not an overly romanticized one. Yunior himself is a very engaging character, despite the fact that he is a horrible cheater.

One thing that I didn't like about this book was how it skips around in time. After several stories I was able to place the chronology based on which characters were present, and if Rafa was sick or not, but I felt very disoriented. I feel like if it had been told in a chronological order I would have felt more of a connection of the story. Another thing that bothered me was the overt use of spanish. I was able to understand what most of it meant with context clues, but sometimes I felt lost as to what was going on in the scene. Finally, I felt like the stories that did not feature Yunior felt very out of place and random.

Junot Diaz's book This is How You Lose Her recounts the dysfunctional love life of Yunior. Diaz portrays Yunior as a stereo-typical hispanic male with all the machismo of his fore fathers flowing through his veins. Like his Dad and brother, he is a womanizer.

In my book club I found the women had a difficult time dealing with Yunior's ways. Some found him and his cavalier attitude toward love, reprehensible. Honestly, he didn't bother me. Oh sure he was pathetic and when he screwed up his relationships, which he inevitably did, he moped around like a love sick puppy, pounding on his chest and sobbing oh woes me. Yeah, bring out the violins.

Yunior knows he is wrong and he is devastated when busted. At the end of one relationship he slips into a deep depression and you say to yourself, well Yunior you knew this could happen so you shouldn't be surprised. Yet, he continues his wandering ways.

Unfortunately Diaz makes this story one dimensional, solely focusing on Yunior's womanizing and not delving into the deeper and darker psychological aspect of this destructive behavior. Was it because he wasn't his mother's favorite? Was his dad that much of an influence on him? Why does Yunior not seem to learn from his mistakes?

A raw, earthy use of language is used to tell this story. Yunior, his brother Rafa and his mother are the protagonist with several women thrown in. The women are flat in character but then again it's not their story....it's all about Yunior.

To begin, I have not read anything written by Junot Díaz before I picked up this book. I didn't know what to expect and nor was I aware of the fact that Yunior is a character that shows up rather frequently in Díaz's writings. Do you have to read everything else before you read this book? No, it works as a stand alone book.

Within this book's pages, you will find story after story of pain, heartache and love. Between man and woman, mother and father, brothers, and cultures. There are lines so electrifying that I had to stop for a moment and just let them sink in. They were that beautiful. This book does not portray a perfect love story. What it does show us is the hard work that goes into a love that will last. It also shows just how quickly someone can lose everything. Sadly, it sometimes takes losing it all to realize that you truly had everything to begin with.

All the stories were executed extremely well - but I must say that Díaz saved the absolutely best story for last, The Cheater's Guide to Love. Now, I haven't done much background research on Díaz (yet), but I have heard that much of his writing is autobiographical in nature. I learned not long after picking up the book that he and his fiancee broke up about 5 years before This is How You Lose Her was published. I bring this up because The Cheater's Guide to Love appears to be the most intimate portrayal of love lost in the whole collection. I believe this is the reason why it made my heart hurt the most while I read it.

A co-worker that saw me reading this told me that he heard Díaz was labeled a misogynist by some critics. I truly do not see the hatred or dislike of women in these stories. After hearing what my co-worker said, I read with a critical eye, looking for this hatred. However, I did not find any. Maybe I'm not sensitive enough, or maybe I have a different way of understanding - but when I read his words, I read the pain of losing the "right" woman and having no one to blame but himself in the end.

You may notice that this is the most I have written about any book (except for maybe The Millennium Series). That, is how much I truly enjoyed these stories. Now, keep in mind, these are love stories in the most realistic sense. They are not perfect fairy tales, so do not expect to find them. There is some Dominican slang, some Spanish and some vulgar words. These did not bother me, but I read a book for the story and I am not sensitive to these details. Keep this in mind when you think about picking up this book. Needless to say, I loved it (and now need to own it).

Junot Diaz is one of those authors who has gained fame (or notoriety) not only for his popular and award-winning fiction but also for his brash persona and expletive-laden interviews. His confidence is well-deserved, as his new collection of short stories, THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE HER, demonstrates from the first page to the last. Several of the stories will be familiar to readers of The New Yorker and other publications, but others are new, and this is the first time that the several loosely linked stories have appeared in the same volume. The result is a realistic, thoughtful exploration of love (and, as the title suggests, love lost), often as funny as it is sad.

Several of the stories focus on a character called Yunior, a young man whose biography seems to mirror Diaz's own. We see Yunior both as a child --- adjusting to winter in the unpleasant New Jersey neighborhood where his family settles after emigrating from the Dominican Republic --- and as a young man, both during and after his older brother's illness and eventual death from leukemia. Yunior both idolizes and eventually reviles his older brother, and although he'd probably never admit it, he learns much of his attitude and behavior toward women both from his brother and from his philandering father. "Both your father and your brother were sucios," Diaz's narrator writes of Yunior, "Sucios of the worst kind and now it's official: you are one, too."

Their father eventually leaves the family, and their mother's endless mourning --- over the loss of her homeland, her husband, and eventually her son --- is a consistent backdrop to Yunior's tales of his own youthful bad behavior. Diaz's depiction of women is both lustful and affectionately realistic; a woman who is at first described as having a "slash of black hair" and "a chest you wouldn't believe --- I'm talking world-class" is described on the next page as being "one of those quiet, semi-retarded girls" and as having "big stupid lips and a sad moonface and the driest skin." Likewise, the older neighbor with whom Yunior later starts a love affair is described as almost mannish in appearance even as it's clear that Yunior feels a strong sexual attraction toward her.

Although Yunior is an inveterate cheater, an objectifier of women, and a less than perfect son, it's hard not to like him --- for his honesty, if for nothing else. His bravado often masks a vulnerability that, when it does come to the surface, results in moments of tender loveliness: "We park across from the map dealer and go to our bookstore... You sit yourself down in an aisle and start searching through the boxes... You're the only person I've ever met who can stand a bookstore as long as I can. A smartypants, the kind you don't find every day." Of course, this relationship, as seemingly right and respectful as Yunior can achieve, is still doomed to failure. But that doesn't mean readers stop rooting for him, or for the other profoundly sympathetic characters who populate Diaz's stories.

Reviewed by Norah Piehl

This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz is a 2012 collection of short stories that have been enjoyed by many including Oprah, Maureen Corrigan, Michiko Katutani, Francine Prose, and several others. This collection was named Finalist for the 2012 National Book Award, A Time Magazine Top 10 Book of 2012, People Magazine’s #2 Book of 2012, Finalist for the Story Prize, and Finalist for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. I enjoyed this collection of short stories by Junot Diaz, because his work consists of vivid descriptions, focuses on the character’s personal change, and includes suspenseful elements that keep the reader attentive.
Junot Diaz writes short stories that include vivid descriptions, because it allows his readers to imagine each scene completely. In the short story, The Sun the Moon the Stars, Diaz describes the clouds as “hot white clouds stranded in the sky.” Diaz uses temperature and position to help the reader imagine the summer day and the location of the clouds. In the short story, The Sun the Moon the Stars, the character describes the cars when he says, “automobiles swarming across every flat stretch of ground.” The author uses sound to describe the speed of the car. In the story, Nilda, the character describes Nilda’s hair as “super-long hair, like those Pentecostal girls.” Diaz uses a metaphor to help the reader visualize the exact length of her hair.
Some of Junot Diaz’s short stories focus on personal change of some characters. In the short story, The Sun the Moon the Stars, the character describes his love for Magda when he says “but it’s true: Magda’s my heart. I didn’t want her to leave me.” After being apart for a short time, the couple got back together. Diaz shows the personal change of the main character from making bad decisions to professing his love and making better decisions. Diaz also writes about personal change in Nilda. After Rafa’s dad past away, Rafa “decided he wasn’t going back to school for his senior year.” Diaz shows the personal change of Rafa staying in school even though he didn’t enjoy it to giving up and dropping out. While reading, Nilda, the main character shared many memories with Nilda but at the end the main character reveals that “we never spoke again. A couple of years later I went away to college and I don’t know where she went.” The dialogue shows how the communication between the characters changed from talking to each other every day to no contact.
I liked how Junot Diaz’s short stories include suspenseful elements that make it interesting for the reader. In the short story, Nilda, the speaker starts the story saying “she seemed to be trying to hold back from crying the whole time.” Diaz begins the short story with this statement to cause the reader to keep reading to find out why Nilda was upset. In The Pura Principle, the character says, “Those last months. No way of wrapping it pretty or pretending otherwise: Rafa was dying” in the first paragraph. Diaz makes the reader want to continue reading to see if Rafa recovers by hooking them in the beginning. In the beginning of the short story, Otravida Otravez, after a long day at work in bread factory, Ramon reveals to Yasmin “we had a man die today at the bread factory.” By revealing the news in the beginning, this causes the reader to become attentive to see how Ramon’s coworker died and to see if Ramon is truly safe at work.
Junot Diaz definitely helps the reader imagine each scene clearly with his vivid descriptions, keeps the reader focused by adding personal change, and keeps the reader alert by adding many suspenseful elements in his collection of short stories, This Is How You Lose Her.

“Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel.

This is how you lose her.”

RECAP:

Coming to the US from the Dominican Republic Yunior recounts his transition in the states and the heartbreaks that follow him as we grows up. He will share with us the loves and loses of Alma, Miss Lora, Magdelena, Nilda and others that impacted his life one way or another. Through his recklessness Yunior shares with us the lessons he learns and lays bear the real facts about "losing someone you lose because of your recklessness".

MY TAKE:

Okay so I had to read this as a book club read at work and have to say that because of the synopsis I was kind of looking forward to it. When I finally got to read it I could not put the book down.

We start off the book with Yunior's relationship with Magdelena. Yunior lets the readers know right away that Magdelena believes that all Dominican men are cheaters. That one sentence sets the stage for the entire book. Yunior flashes from past to present and introduces us to the women in his life and his infidelity. And although I wanted to dislike Yunior and smack him upside his head it was hard. There were times where i felt bad for him and his suffering. When you shouldn't. He is a cheat and the cycle continues throughout the book. The last story in this book shows us that even though he is the way he is there is one women that he loved but betrayed as well. The women's name is never mentioned but you see the impact that she had in his life.

We also learn about his family life and you quickly see that Yunior hasn't had the best influences in life. With a father that is strict and detached, a brother who runs through women and mistreats him, and a mother who stays quiet, Yunior doesn't know anything else while growing up.

I will not get into the stereotyping in this book because it would not suede you one way or the other. I will say that I have grown up around Dominican's so reading this book I was just laughing at the truth in most things and the language that was used.

I liked the book. I liked the realism behind it and you could actually hear the authors voice in it. Throughout the book I felt like I was reading someones real life story. And that in itself makes this book wonderful.

If you want romance this probably isn't your book. But if you want to read about the relationships you will like it.

I say BUY or BORROW it. READ it. ENJOY it.

I heard Junot Diaz speak at a Book Expo America convention in 2012 about what inspired him to write this book. He spoke eloquently about the macho culture of Latino men that prevents them from admitting to or engaging in an emotional commitment to women. Boys aren't brought up to respect women, neither their mothers and sisters, nor their girlfriends or wives.

In This is How You Lose Her, he shows the reader how this culture can be toxic to one's life and loves. Each short story focuses on one relationship that is damaged beyond saving by mistreatment of feelings, and lack of respect. Most of the stories center around one character, Yunior, and his family. In spite of all of Yunior's mistakes and terrible decisions, it's hard not to root for him as he tries to navigate his way through life. There's an element of sadness that runs through all of the stories.

Diaz's earlier books include Drown and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2008. I'll be putting his earlier books on my reading list! I recommend This is How You Lose Her to anyone who enjoys contemporary short fiction.

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I don't like short stories at all. But since Junot Diaz is Junot Diaz I had to read this collection of short stories if just to say that I have read all of her books (three so far).

This is how you lose is not a novel but it does feel like one because somehow, each story is tied to each other in a way that you just feel like you are reading, in reality, one big story in parts.

There was a moment when I felt like "oh no! This is what I paid so much for?" I think that was with the shortest story in the book "Otravez Otravida." But then my sister told me that she felt the same way but that I should reading it because it picks up again and it was really good. I'm glad I did. When I finish the entire book, I went back to this particular story (which I had just skipped) because I still wanted more of `Yunior' (the main character).

What can I say? The man (Diaz) knows his craft. The entire book is a tumultuous read that kept me on the border of stop eating altogether just so I could keep on reading. I just didn't want it to end!

There are some misspelled words in Spanish that I just don't know if they were printed like that by mistake of if that is how Diaz really intended it to be. I'll asking if I ever meeting him in person again.

Also, some reviewers didn't like the book because they got lost with the Spanish cursing and slang. If you read The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao you know what I mean.

Excuse me! Junot Diaz didn't feel the need to include a glossary of those words to the less fortunate ones who don't speak `Dominican" :-)

Being Dominican myself I didn't have troubles with that. I really enjoyed reading how macho Dominican men go down with love a lot worse than we women do.

What else is left to say? That I hope Diaz picks up all of his short stories and turn them into one steady novel. That would definitely win him another Pulitzer!

Seriously, if you don't speak Dominican, keep this [...] glossary of Dominican slang handy when you read the book. This [...] other dictionary and this [...] one are equally good!

Love fades. Love is passionate. Love is obsessive. Love is reckless. Pulitzer Prize-winner Junot Diaz pens a collection of short stories with a central theme: irresistible love.

At the heart of every story is Yunior. Through his memories, readers get a glimpse of his experiences with women. My major gripe is that the series of short stories are not in chronological order. At times, it made the book hard to follow, causing me to pause and figure out when exactly the particular events occurred. Was this relationship before this one? Did he date this girl before or after the last girl? Despite this minor annoyance, Diaz's prose flows into a collection of stories with love at the center. Some of the love affairs fail; some are unresolved. Such is life. However, the author successfully showed that Yunior learned a lesson from every relationship and led him to ultimately realize how he lost her.

For readers that are sticklers for organized chapters, this book may be hard for you to get into. But stick with it; This is How You Lose Her is worth reading. It may spark memories of your own past relationships and will make for good book club discussions.

Literary Marie of Precision Reviews

I was surprised by how much I liked this book.

I don't like gratuitous use of the n-word, I don't normally like Junot Diaz's quotation-less style, but I was captivated by this story. I may have a soft spot for it because I like stories that show the lives of people of color and I'm familiar with the difficulties of living in Cambridge, but all the twists and turns are captured here.

From the tragedies to the larger sad story about life and survival. I think Yunior was astute and terrible and everything in between. The breadth of characters and their choices felt so real and charming. What really got me was the small tragedies, the day to day-ness of some of the decisions characters made

A couple of years ago I saw Mr. Diaz speak to a group of (mostly) college students. He talked about his explorations of love and infidelity. He was exploring how people, even those in a good, loving relationship, screw it up through infidelity and lack of commitment. It was an interesting talk, and it is evident now that Mr. Diaz was in the process of creating this work.

This is How You Lose Her is gritty, raw, and painful--particularly painful in its exploration of the pain of love--the yearning, the heartache, the raw burning pain of love lost. Diaz eloquently expresses relationships of all kinds, parents, children, siblings, as well as those of friends and lovers. At times this was hard to read. I sometimes needed a break between stories to ponder and to digest so this took longer to read than I might have guessed by the slimness of the volume. It was absolutely worth the time to let this work seep into my brain.

And now I feel a need to make my next read a nice, fluffy, chick-lit. :-)

Love is always a wonderful thing and a happy feeling to have in the world. However, love can also be a heartbreaking and terrible feeling as well. We often wonder if we'll ever that special someone. It's found in Junot Díaz's new novel with nine stories that all connect and how love can be a complicated and misunderstood emotion.

In the first story, we follow a young Dominican man named Yunior who talks about the diminished relationship with his lover Magdalena and how it turned sour. Later, we meet his brother Rafa and his girlfriend Nilda, who's as promiscuous and rambunctious as a Jersey Shore girl. Next, there is Yasmin, who's in a awfully dull relationship with a married man and tries to be a good lover. Throughout the rest of the novel, we read more of Yunior's life which include his relationship with his father, dating a mellowed artist and an older woman, and his search for recovery.

What got me to read the novel was it's cover and title. The beginning was good and swift, and through the rest of the novel, I was satisfied but not completely. I felt that there wasn't much romance at all with any of the couples, which I found a bit surprise. However, we get a lot of romantic tension and family drama, as well as humor and emotion. Junot Diaz writes with a mix of Sandra Cisneros and words of passion. Some will find the novel a little hard, while others will enjoy the gray humor and heartbreak. For me, it's a novel that focuses more on heartbreak and emotions. Good book, bad romance (B+).

This is How You Lose Her. Junot's latest does not disappoint. Nine stories mostly follow the protagonist, Yunior, a young Dominican American man who is a loser at love. He's a serial cheater who finds happiness to be something that eludes him over and over again. He can't be honest enough to truly have a one-on-one intimacy with a woman, and even the times he tries, either his heart isn't in it or he does something else to screw it up. The stories aren't all told in Yunior's historical order and they jump around from late teenage years to childhood to adulthood. Junot's fantastic prose is on display again. He has a way of making the most mundane things seem so beautiful and melancholy. His brother Rafa is a womanizing, rude, cancer-stricken jerk of a man, his mother a nurturing and hard-working sympathetic woman. You meet several characters and many women that Yunior is involved with. My favorite story is "Alma." I read it over and over again for days, maybe two weeks, before I went to the next chapter. I was so impressed and enamored with how such a short story (the shortest in the book) can evoke so many different emotions and start out so grand and make you feel so full of giddiness only to end up slicing like a machete. Yunior is no ladies' man, since he can't hold onto or be respected enough by the women he "loves" but he's also not a devil. You end up sympathizing with him a weird way eventhough his actions seem to always come trampling down hard. This is why Junot is one of my favorite authors. No bull, no apologies, and it ends up being a book that leaves you thinking aftewards.
Always a good thing.

Oh, I can't really fathom giving a BAD review to a Junot Díaz book. That sounds pretty crazy. I did love it. I love his language, his humor, his New Jersey/Boston/New York mojo, his self-reflexivity, the Dominican Republic interplay--all of it. But, yeah, I might have liked DROWN a bit more. The novelty of it, you know. So, in my short time, let me just address a few common criticisms I keep hearing:

1. The book doesn't cover new territory. It's Yunior (probably, almost definitely, Junot) all over again. Lazy writing. Autobiographical--nothing daring, nothing beyond the realities of this guy's life. MY RESPONSE: Who cares? If it's good, it's good. If he's interesting--which he is--he's interesting. If Junot Díaz uses his life, exposes his life, for literary purposes--better than almost everyone else can--let's celebrate that. Hemingway didn't exactly venture out onto new territory; like Díaz, he was just interesting.

2. The book is a little smutty. MY RESPONSE: It is, a little. But like some of my other favorite smutty writers (Steve Almond), he's more than that. So I'm not going to reduce him to smutty.

3. For a guy who takes like a billion years to write a book (this is only his third), THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE HER is pretty slim. He could've given us a little more. MY RESPONSE: It would've been nice. At the same time, I think it's truly amazing for anyone to write one great book, let alone three--and, if you write at all, you know how difficult it is to write a single strong paragraph. Yeah, the volume is slender. It's like one of those tiny desserts you get at a nice restaurant. Why so small? It's so good. I want more! But okay.

4. Sometimes, it's hard to figure out what the Spanish stuff means. MY RESPONSE: This is true. I don't remember feeling the language discrepancy with his other stuff. This time, I think I missed a few things.

5. The best story is "Otravida, Otravez," which is the only story told from the perspective of a woman. And it's a non-Yunior story. MY RESPONSE: This may be true too. But the whole book is totally engaging, so I'm not sure it's all that significant to determine that this one is the best.

6. Díaz writes in the second person, and WE ALL KNOW YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO DO THAT. MY RESPONSE: I love it. I always have--ever since my friend Julie Hensley turned in a second person story for a workshop in grad school. Then, there's Lorrie Moore. I read this whole passage to my husband, and it's in second person and it's smutty. I give you Junot: "You, Yunior, have a girlfriend named Alma, who has a long tender horse neck and a big Dominican ass that seems to exist in a fourth dimension beyond jeans. An ass that could drag the moon out of orbit. An ass she never liked until she met you. Ain't a day that passes that you don't want to press your face against that ass or bite the delicate sliding tendons of her neck. You love how she shivers when you bite, how she fights you with those arms that are so skinny they belong on an after-school special." (This is the first paragraph of "Alma.") Tell me that's not great.

That's it. I heard Díaz on NPR, and it sounded like he was making a case for character development over the course of the story cycle, as if he were suggesting that Yunior, the protagonist of most of the short stories, matures by the book's end. I'm not totally sure I would agree. Really, I look forward to more Yunior. I liked where this book left him, an aging player, a professor and a writer, somewhere off of Harvard Square. There's more maturing out there for this guy. If Díaz can dazzle us with more, I hope he does so.

Judging by the reviews here, this author must be assigned reading in classrooms all over America and most people seem to react to that by harping on the author's previous novels which I havent read and don't think I want to read. I thought this novel was rather sad especially in the beginning but then too at the end which was rather just what you should expect after junior's bizarre upbringing. Junior never was able to step out of his macho role with women and so was unable to bond with one. He couldn't figure out why and wound up suffering. The author has a way with words and tossing in all the Spanish was effective in that the characters were immigrants and of course that's how they would feel being unable to understand English and visa versa. But then junior became a professor at Harvard! ... so very educated that he even uses the word "fulgurating" such a" fulgurating sadness"...ha ha...junior feels a fulgurating sadness...sure...then later he feels fulguration all over his body...he becomes infirm...The title of the book is perfect. Maybe junior could go to Sex Addicts Anonymous (SAA), an organization that describes itself as providing a twelve-step program for recovery from what it calls sex addiction.

I liked this book ok. It's interesting to see the Dominican-American take on life. Me being a middle aged white man in the suburbs, it's fun to get a different cultural outlook, etc. That said, Diaz seems like he leans on his cultural and Spanish references too much as a crutch. I read for enjoyment and when every page has multiple unknown terms/phrases, it gets irritating. On the plus side, I liked the narrator viewpoint in a couple of the stories, where it's second person, he's talking to "you", and it feels like it could be himself, but it could also be "you" putting yourself in his place. Diaz pulls this off and it feels right.

Diaz is a very good writer, and there are times where he expresses emotions and circumstances that come out only in the best fiction. He's got the tools and can turn a phrase with the best. But I just found too much of this book to be off-putting or a downer (with little upside), e.g. treating women poorly, rough upbringing circumstances, and Hispanic homeboy inside jokes. I need there to be forward momentum and something that lights a fire at the end of the tunnel. Not enough of either here for me.

I had a chance to listen to Mr. Diaz be interviewed on Fresh Air, and he was tremendously interesting. In this book, he doesn't have characters, he has people. People I know, have been nervous to talk to, lived next door to. A great writer can convince you that what you read is history, a live experience that happens in real time. Mr. Diaz excels at this.

I gave this 4 stars because I don't like a bumper crop of f-bombs in writing. People say 'that's how people talk', but they only talk that way because of the steady diet of tv and films. It's what I think of as self-fulfilling prophecy.

Lastly, some people complain that they don't speak Spanish and can't get the colloquialisms. Are they unfamiliar with the Internet? Just google it :(

stories are claimed to be interconnected, but not really; since you cannot follow any of it due to unnecessarily numerous sketchy characters. some tend to be sad stories but it is impossible to feel sorry for any of the pathetic characters. at least i didnt care. i dont think this is a good portrayal of DR community as well. summary of the book: a vulgar representation of an immigrant, a loser, an outsider with excessive use of dominican slang

This is how you lose her - Junot Diaz

The book consists of a series of interconnected short stories that form the novel about Yunior and his loves. The first stories are startling in its direct and character-driven barrio language peppered with Spanish and obscenities. I wondered whether I could finish the novel, as the way in which Yunior looks at women and is out for one thing only--sex--put me off.
Then I got hooked in and continued reading the story about Yunior's older brother and how he eventually died. It was clear that it would end badly for big brother. This story, as well as each next story defied any stereotype I might have had about anything, and the unique perspective is fascinating. The book gave a glance into a world that a middle class, boomer woman like me has not experienced.

Yunior's family moved to the US, Pennsylvania from the Dominican Republic when the brothers are of primary school age.Their dad keeps them indoors, much like what people to with cats do after a move, so they will stay and not run home. The boys must acquire a sense of place and change their ways from their routines back home, such as pee wherever or take a dump behind a bush when they had to go. For the first time they have a bathroom and running water for that purpose.Otherwise, Yunior's dad is an absent figure for much of the rest of the stories.
The novel is narrated in the second person, which gives it some jocularity. Each story reveals more about Yunior and his family, drawing the reader in. A common theme seems to be the search for love and company. These stories give a rather bleak picture of life in his neighborhood, as Yunior goes through his adolescence and feels like an outsider.
The disclosures of Yunior's views and his acts of betrayal perpetrated on the many women in his world (and the women in turn preying on him for god knows what--security or maybe love, to combat the loneliness in the act of sex?) are fascinating, but also raises a feeling of desperation.
There's a lot of cheating going on. Yunior's was so lucky as to have a controversial relationship as a high school student with an older woman that he carries as a secret with him. He seemed to have loved this woman, but when he starts a serious relationship with a girl in college, he ends the relationship with this older woman, Lora.
I am rooting for him in the hope that he has seen the light and will change his ways and can bond with a woman his equal, when he meets a woman who he really loves and admires, but no such luck.
As the dog he really is, he cannot pass up a good opportunity and the cheating continues, even after he finds this marvelous woman that he gets engaged to.
Of course this ends badly, but I won't give away too much of the story.

The novel is spellbinding and one needs to read on, in spite of the use of the nasty vernacular in the protagonist's voice, that is off-putting in its misogynistic flavor.
Not an easy novel. It reads like a memoir; much of it seems to be autobiographical or inspired by the author's own life, as Yunior has a similar background as the author in terms of Latin heritage, profession as a novel writer and an English professor.
I can see why the book was recognized and award winning. It makes one think about love, life, destination, and questions who is the prey and who is the predator.

I loved this book. And there is no reason on paper why I would. Well I am from New Jersey and so I understood the nuance of neighborhoods and cultures being referenced. I'm not Latino, I'm not a guy, I'm not a serial cheater. The prose style might put some people off when it starts rambling along but stay with it because at the end of a sentence, at the end of a chapter, you exhale and realize that you are feeling something. And isn't that what writing and reading are about? The ability to make you feel something. And I did. Over and over and over. The highs, the lows, the guilt, the heartbreak. And when you read the very words, "This is how you lose her" your heart might skip a beat or two. It is that powerful. I thought this book was exquisite.

I've seen this book for over a year on the the store best seller list and never explored any of Diaz work until this year. I read Drown, then Oscar Wao and now this. I didn't want those stories to end and after reading each book it felt like they continued aspects of the Dominican story among the main characters. I love the rhythm of his prose but at the same time I feel sadly disconnected to people from the DR. I always considered non-white people of African descent to share a historical connection with African-Americans but sadly, it appears that Dominicans do not feel any connection with African Americans and so many of them look just like me. It won't keep me from loving to hear more stories about their culture. Thanks Mr. Diaz for sharing.

From reading other reviews, this must be one of those books you either love or hate. I loved it, from the first story about Magda. I enjoyed reading stories from a man's perspective as well as from a very different culture than my own middle-class, So. Calif. white existence. Diaz excels at planting you into this world and you feel like you are there with the characters. The Spanish/Spanglish phrases contributed and most of the time I was able to guess what they meant (at times I considered quickly Googling the slang but didn't want to lose how engrossed I was in the stories). This book creates a strong sense of empathy for people disconnected from their homeland and struggling to survive and connect in a new world. Diaz's descriptions are like poetry yet it's still a quick read. Memorable characters and setting. For me the last story was my least favorite as the issues that beset the author didn't really ring true, but I still enjoyed the entire book.

This is How You Lose Her is a novel written in short story form. The main character, Yunior, is a tragic but compelling individual. I really liked him, even though he liked to sleep around on his women and had some of his own issues to get over. Living in America but born in Santo Domingo, Yunior was trying to adjust and live life, all while chasing as many women as possible.

While I was reading, I came across this quote that made me laugh. This occurred while Yunior and his mother were discussing a neighbor who didn't have any children:

"Maybe she just doesn't like children." "Nobody likes children, your mother assured you. That doesn't mean you don't have them." (p. 153)

I highly recommend this book!

Thanks for reading,

Rebecca @ Love at First Book

These interrelated stories about the sorrows of trying to find it all in relationships, and the temptations and disappointments that attend the pursuit give us both a universal recognition about our first forays into love, but also a cultural glimpse into the world of assimilating hispanics. Yunior, our hero, is trying to aim high,not wanting to repeat the pathology of the absent father, and if he falls short on the integrity scale, he occasionally scores a blow for goodness. Diaz' writing is lovely and understated. I love the depiction of he, his mother and brother finally venturing out of their new apartment after being in America for weeks, to find a snowy, icy foreign world, in which travelling a few blocks feels like walking on the moon.That here is harshness, and brutality,in the new world does not take away from the courage of those who persevere. The stories feel autobiographical and he writes with intensity and a directness that I admired.

This is How You Lose Her is a collection of interwoven short stories that center around the main character, Yunior and his womanizing exploits. Many of the stories focus on topics that border on the tragic (cheating husbands tearing families apart, young people dying of cancer, etc.) but the author, Junot Diaz, manages to add some dark humor to the tales which makes them more palatable for the reader.

I enjoyed this book although by the end of it, I wasn't wholeheartedly rooting for Yunior, sad guy that he is. . .

While reading this book, I had to look up plenty of words in the dictionary, both English words (Mr. Diaz has quite a vocabulary!) and Spanish ones. I also looked up some Spanglish/slang words on the internet to try to get some sense of their meaning. I kind of enjoyed that aspect of the book and I think that I would have missed a lot if I hadn't looked the unknown words up as I read this book.

Junot Diaz reprises his well-developed character, Yunior, in nine short stories collected under the title of one, This Is How You Lose Her. Diaz knows how to riff about love: passion, heartbreak, mistakes, falling head over heels. Yunior's longing for love and his ease for losing what he most desires, made me laugh and wince. Diaz does an outstanding job of presenting well fleshed out characters quickly, and using imagery and dialogue to allow readers to enter into their world. You may not like Yunior, but you will understand him. You will also understand the parade of women he loves and loses. I paced myself by reading one story at a time. That gave me time to reflect and to savor the treat of Diaz' fine writing. Readers who love crisp writing with a distinct voice should take a look at this well-written collection of stories.

Rating: Four-star (I like it)

Originally Reviewed on gemrene.wordpress.com

This Is How You Lose Her is a collection of short stories following characters from the Dominican Republic who have immigrated to the United States. The stories are centered around relationships, love, family, and the idea of being with someone and what that means. The collection is full of manipulation, both by males and females, strife, stereotypes, and foul language. I found it eye-opening.

The first story was by far my favorite. It chronicles the fall of Yunior and Magdalena’s relationship and I thought it was well constructed and well done. Díaz managed to portray the situation in such a realistic way that really reached out to me as a reader. The last story, “A Cheater’s Guide to Love”, was probably my second favorite and also the longest. Most of the stories follow or contain Yunior, but others branch off to follow different characters, all of whom are experiencing the hardships living in America brings and forming connections—both good and bad—with other Dominicans.

Overall, I really enjoyed This Is How You Lose Her. It sparked my interest in Junot Díaz’s other books and gave me new perspective on a facet of hispanic (mainly Dominican) culture and society, especially within the United States. The collection of stories is not beautiful in a happy way; it’s actually kind of a downer filled with tragedy, repeated mistakes, misery, and heartbreak. While some of the stories were dull, I thought the entire collection as a whole was cohesive and illustrious, and I recommend giving it a shot if the premise interests you. I’m glad I did.

Junot Diaz is my favorite contemporary write. His voice is elegant, poetic, and dynamic. (His book of stories, "Drown," is a slightly better read, if at all possible.

In this novel, Yunior from "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" resurfaces, and this time he's heartbroken. Several times. He's the link in the stories of "This Is How You Lose Her," and often narrates the stories in Diaz's latest work. Yes, Yunior cheats, is sexist, and often makes bad choices, but he still manages to be a sympathetic character.

This book is classic Diaz--raw, vulgar, energetic, funny, and sometimes written in Spanglish.

I enjoyed the book and overall it was decent. The book uses many words that I did not like just for the sheer vulgarity and I felt other words could have been used instead. I guess Junot Diaz felt these words added to his overall theme in the novel and they might have but I would have rather him going the other route. If you can get pass this, I feel the books message is a good one to analyze. I wont go into details on the main narrative but if you can get past the vulgarity you may enjoy it as much or maybe even more than I did.

Mitt Romney is still scratching his head, wondering how come he lost. As much as he protests, it wasn't because of "the gifts" Obama promised. It was the fact that Romney never caught on with Hispanic voters. And that, to paraphrase the title of Junot Daiz' splendid new story collection, is "How You Lose the White House." If Romney had spent his flying time reading Diaz instead of L. Ron Hubbard he might have figured out something he needed to know about America today.

One appeal of Diaz' fiction is that it welcomes us into America's Latino heartland and makes us feel like neighbors, if a little nervous that we'll miss something important because the characters often speak in a throbbing melange of Spanglish, hip hop, the barrio and the ghetto, uttering words like "shrooming" (Diaz for "f...ing"). Not to worry, you'll get the picture. Tip: forget about Google Translate if you get stuck. It doesn't have Diaz figured out.

Seven of the nine stories are told from the point of view of Yunior Urbano, the second and less favored son of Dominican immigrants to New York City. Yunior is bright, going somewhere, if he can stop pursuing Latino woman and whitegirls long enough to finish his education. But Yunior's success with women is Instructional League caliber compared to his older brother Rafa's major league success. But Diaz' stories are far more than tail chasing tales and offer far more insights into immigrant Hispanic life than the title of "The Cheater's Guide to Love," the final story, would lead you to believe.

"The Pura Principle" is my favorite story - the Urbanos at home, although by this time the father has split. They are home because Rafa is dying from cancer. Mami, his doting mother, has the need and opportunity to love him to his dying day. She and her circle of women friends, the group Rafa describes as " The Four Horsefaces of the Apocalypse", pray for him every day. Rafa can do no wrong in his mother's loving eyes. If Rafa had "come home one day and said, Hey, Ma, I exterminated half the planet . . . she would have fended his ass: Well, hijo, we were overpopulated." But she drew the line at Pura, Rafa's end of life amiguita. "Pura's face, her timing, her personality, just drove Mami batshit." Acting on the "Pura Principle" Mami turns Rafa and Pura out and she doesn't relent until Pura is out of the picture.

"Otravida, Otravez" (Another Life, Another Time) offers up the emotional hardship involved for Yasmin, Ramon's Nueva York common law wife, and Virta, his legal wife and mother of his son back in Santo Domingo -- the classic immigrant triangle. The fact that it is all more or less out in the open, more or less taken for granted as part of the cost of migration, makes it all the more poignant. As Yasmin's girl friend tells her, "We are not here for fun."

The last story, "The Cheater's Guide to Love", deals with the tribulations of the recovering lover whose cheating cost him the woman he fully intended to marry. While this isn't a story from Yunior's checkered love life, it does make one think that the narrator is an alter ego of Yunior (and, perhaps, the author).

End note. The title for my review, "Almost too good for his own good" is a quotation from Leah Hager Cohen's highly favorable review (New York Times Book Review September 20, 2012). She writes, and I agree, Diaz' "prose style is ... irresistible ... sheerly entertaining." Is it ever!

A fine follow-up to Oscar Wao. Not nearly as ambitious, which is fine, because that might have meant waiting a decade or so for another book from Diaz. He's much too good a writer to make us wait that long again. This is How You Lose Her (love the title) is basically a series of scenes, collection of short stories on the same theme, rather than a novel. One might say it's Drown II, featuring a character from his Pulitzer Prize winning novel rather than his debut work. If you have the time you may devour this book in a single sitting. His prose goes down easy and resonates long after you've read the last page. No synopsis required because the title tells you all you need to know.

Reason you should read this book #1: it’s a page-turning picaresque, festooned with Dominican slang, striking similes, and earthy anecdotes. Diaz spins the yarn of many failed relationships into a checkered tragicomic fabric with great effect.

Reason #2: While being fast-paced, the book also carries a serious message about the significance of race, and the weight of the challenges, for Latino immigrants in America. Some of us who grew up well off and in the majority culture might like to think that we are moving toward a post-racial society, but Diaz’s book (like certain notable current events from 2014) makes a compelling case that the American dream comes a lot more easily for some of us than others.

Reason #3: For students of the contemporary literary landscape, the novel represents an important voice for American culture in the 21st century. As the Latino community continues to grow in the United States, it is increasingly imperative for the rest of us to understand their stories, and through that understanding, work better to create the country that immigrants are hoping to find.

(Why didn't I rank it higher? A less weighty feel, less of a sense of craft, and only intermittently wow-inducing phrasing--as opposed to the truly superlative novels I've read in the last few years, such as The History of Love, All the Light We Cannot See, or Home.)

Yunior and Rafa provide the backdrop to this book's slices of Dominican American life! Delivered in short connective chapters, you get to delve into the Latin Caribbean culture.. this native New Yorker always feels like she is getting a sneak peek into a wide open life when Junot Diaz tells a story.
I didn't find this as entertaining as his masterpiece "Oscar Wao..." but there were enough scenes to conjure sympathy and giggles that left an endearing feeling for Yunior.
My entertainment reading blocks have been handicapped by my crazy life, so to finish in 3 weeks was quite a feat and testimony to this book's engaging stories... Junot does it once again.

With the big brouhaha surrounding Diaz's 2007 Pulitzer-winning novel "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," this second story collection by Diaz (the first, 1996's "Drown") seems a bit forced, released just to have something new by Diaz on the market. The stories here seem like either outtakes from "Wao" or an attempt at a new novel that never quite came together: i.e., lots of overlapping themes and storylines that the author (with pressure from his editors?) seems to have simply not wanted to bother to fuse into a cohesive whole.

That said, Diaz's writing here is, as usual, intimate and astute (and, yes, fun to read). Because the narrator's voice in the stories is so deceptively easy and vernacular, you can be initially fooled into thinking that the stories themselves are also simple... Not so. There's an intimacy and subtlety in both the physical and mental details of the characters' lives that's profound and beautiful. The last story in the collection -- "The Cheater's Guide to Love" -- is especially psychologically brilliant and well-written. The traditional "does he get her back?" question is answered flat out by page 3 of the 38-page story; you keep reading because the narrator's mental/physical journey after such a huge psychic loss is so interesting (and heartbreaking and, ultimately, redemptive in a completely non-phony wonderment-at-the-universe kind of way).

I wasn't AS blown away by the other stories in the collection, but I LIKED them. The family relations, neighborhood relations, lover relations, relations with one's roots... All, again, very psychologically intricate and delicate despite the often deceptively simple bravado of Diaz's narrators' voices.

It is a collection of short stories about how to lose your woman. They give an insight to the thinking of a man from Santo Domingo and from someone who deserves to lose each and every woman. I read the short stories to study his style. It should be useful.

This book.... where do I start? It drove me up the wall. It's so messed up. Every single character is obsessed with body parts and sex. The author describes people more like objects. Yunior, the main character, will not stop cheating. He just won't. This is how you lose her? No, this is how you act if you're a heartless jerk. This is how you lose any respect or admiration the reader might have for you, bud. Every single man in this story is a cheater (if I remember right). They all give vivid and objectifying descriptions of women. I don't mind some cussing, but this guy just won't quit. Every other word is either an f-bomb or the n-word. There is hardly any change from beginning to end. Just sex, sex, sex, sex. Cheat, cheat, cheat, cheat. Repeat, repeat, repeat. I mean, COME ON! Almost zero growth or change in any of the characters. I regret picking this book up.

Author Junot Diaz has crafted a wonderful, intensely entertaining story about Yunior, a young Dominican immigrant who previously appeared as a side character in his Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. In this book Yunior is the central figure, occupying a place in nearly all of the nine tales within. The main theme of the stories involves his search for love. Like with most of us, the search contains a myriad of ups and downs.

Yunior grew up in the macho, Dominican world of his male role models, namely his father and brother. While learning from their ways with women, Yunior finds himself interested in other, less macho pursuits, such as comic books and science fiction. The book jumps from his first days in the U.S. as a young boy (learning to speak English from TV) to his teen years and through adulthood. Diaz's writing is infused with pop culture references (most of which I got), Spanish slang (some of which I got), and Dominican references. The tales run the gamut from funny to sad to uplifting. The chapter about the death of his older brother from cancer was particularly affecting and stayed with me. Overall, it's a fascinating pastiche of stories, all with the central theme of love, romance, and even sex.

Diaz has crafted a tale worthy of the many comparisons to author Phillip Roth. His stories all intertwine together with a familiar voice, to make a read worthy of a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist. I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in the complexities of how the male psyche deals with love, culture, and finding oneself.

I fell in love with Junot Diaz when I read The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao in college. It's a sigh of relief and a breath of excitement to read someone writing about Latinos. I feel like my culture is invisible in this country, which is a damn shame because hey, we have interesting lives, too. Reading This Is How You Lose Her is a fantastic read from the first page to the last.

Although this book is technically a collection of short stories, it reads more like a short novel. It's evident from the beginning of the book that things are not going to end well, but as a reader you don't know how it's going to unravel. The switch in point of view isn't confusing and feels natural. The same goes for the change in narrator.

I love how original the stories are and how they are filled with so much passion. The characters are so flawed and in the end that's what makes them so human and real. There is a lot of humor in here but also much sadness and grief. Even though all these horrible events happen, in the end there is a tiny shard of hope that shines through. With This Is How You Lose Her, Diaz proves that he is an author that writes with both intelligence and emotion.

Finally! The voice and excellent writing of a real dude. Yunior makes the typical dude mistakes - cheats on his girlfriends, gets into relationships for the wrong reasons. He reflects on these relationships at some depth but not at the depth and manner of a tortured emasculated white male that seems to be the dominant voice of male writers these days.

I thought it was a fresh new voice from the male writing contingent.

I highly recommend

Don't understand all the hype on this book. It was well written and easy to read...however, I was hoping to get insight into Yunior's horrendous treatment of women (and infidelity in general), but it just didn't click for me. I understand the notion that we repeat the mistakes of our parents, but it feels more like a long-winded excuse that even Yunior doesn't quite believe. For Rafa, I can buy that, as he's kind of obtuse. But we're led to believe that Yunior has some self-reflective qualities and a notion of what's right and wrong. He occasionally seemed quite sensitive, particularly when bad things were directed at him (like prejudice, poverty, slights of pretty girls who liked his brother, etc.). But I never quite understood the cheating still (and sort of wondered who'd want to with him?). I feel like there's something missing -- even the book itself feels cowardly. Also, the ending where he's pining away doesn't ring true given his history. The strongest feeling I had was -- I'm SO glad the girl got away. While we hear lots about Yunior's suffering, what isn't brought to light is what his fiancee had to go through. It's very hard to trust after a trauma like that. May she find a man who doesn't betray her. And may all the Yuniors in the world grow the bleep up. I'm just saying.

I absolutely adored Oscar Wao and was really looking forward to this book. I don't mind the Spanglish or slang Spanish phrasing (Google translate people, get with it) as I feel like it lends itself to the character and the overall vibe of the book. I don't even really care so much about the misogyny, because I feel like sure, misogyny is totally unfortunate, but there are scrubs like this everywhere, and sometimes when you read grown up books you have to deal with unfortunate themes. Diaz has a strong, compelling voice... to a point.

Because when you're 5 stories in and it's still the same BS, you start to get a little tired. No one is learning anything or developing or making you laugh or cry. It's just the same story, over and over again. It become exhausting. Maybe it's because I'm not that girl that's going to keep taking you back that I find this book so tiring. I'm willing to cut you some slack, salcedenio, but after a hundred pages of self aggrandizing auto biography you lose me. And this is how you lose her. Your loyal reader, out.

Junot Diaz' style blends humor, real talk, street swagger, Dominican flavor, sexual rawness, and--above all--tenderness. His work cuts one up like a pro fishermen and holds the emotional viscera up to your nose and demands that you taste it. Real art removes your ego and forces you to discern an aspect of the human experience with transparency and cold honesty.
In This is How You Lose Her, a collection of short stories centered around Yunior, Diaz reloads the clip that won him madd critical acclaims with Oscar Wao. He spits with the same prose, an irresistible voice of an educated, horned up, unfaithful, macho, slightly nerdy, full on romantic. Yunior has been hardened by a lifetime of racism, working class conditions, trying to fit in culturally, getting his heart stomped on by girlfriends due to his infidelity. Still, my man is all heart; he wants to love so badly, but he can't seem to lose his cheating ways, which is the one trait that always dooms his relationships, much like how Oscar felt his fatness was a hopeless obstacle to romantic acceptance.
Still, life goes on. Yunior still dreams about Lola, "the ciquapa of my dreams."
This is How You Lose Her is all about the weakness of the human heart. Like 2pac said, "you're a sucker for love."

If I could only choose one word to describe Diaz's latest work, I don't think I could come up with an adequate description. It's simply beautiful. I've been a fan of his since my junior year Ethnic Contemporary Literature class in undergrad. His work was raw, gritty, and left me looking at the world slightly differently than I previously had. It's been years, and a law school education since I've read Diaz. I started the book at 5:00 yesterday evening, and finished it at 10:00 only pausing to feed and walk the dogs, and heat up some soup to calm the rumbling in my stomach. When I finished the book, I just had to sit on the couch and let it soak in. As another reviewer pointed out, this book leaves you with such a good feeling about the characters. You watch Yunior mature, grow, and make the same mistakes time and time again. Isn't that what love is about? Diaz writes with the same raw gritty passion that we all love him for. Yunior makes you feel like one of the chosen few invited to experience his world full of triumphs and defeat. There are 9 short stories, including at least one I remember from his previous work, but they all flow together. Except, I'm still not sure how the one story from the female point of view intersects with the rest of the stories, or if it's supposed to be a stand alone story. That being said, it definitely reads like a novel. As far as the "language" goes- it's authentic. If it makes you feel uncomfortable, that's good. But, whether right or wrong (I'm African-American and going with wrong) it doesn't mean this isn't how some people or cultures actually communicate with one another. So, try not to get too caught up in the language, and just come along for the ride.

This is the second collection of short fiction that I've read by Junot Diaz. Here Diaz explores various types of love (physical and romantic) through his protagonist Yunior. The writing is playful, fast paced, and full of references to popular culture. If your life is marked by being in and out of love, this collection could be a companion for your journey.

Also recommended: "Jenna's Flaw"

In just 3 books Dias has managed a Pulitizer, a MacArthur grant and now a National Book Award nomination. It's hard not to feel a little bit apprehensive that he can't possibly live up to that sort of hype. "This Is How You Lose Her" is absolutely stunning. With the Yunior character, previously featured in his other books, Dias has truly achieved an authentic voice. What makes Yunior authentic is how totally imperfect he is. He can love a women so completely that he can embrace her flaws and in spite of this perfect love go and cheat on her with a women he doesn't even find to be all that attractive. Dias is able to render Yunior so fully that not only is it believable, but as the stories progress the reader cringes in expectation of it. This isn't just a catalog of one man's dating failures these stories also deal with the immigrant experience, death in the family, poverty and religion.That he is able to accomplish all of this in such sparse prose is truly a testament to his talents. The only real stutter in the book is the single story that dispenses with the Yunior character in favor of an immigrant woman. The story really only appears weak because the Yunior character is so powerfully rendered in all of the other stories.

Well, this is one of those books that makes me feel like I'm either an idiot or a terrible person. I liked it but I didn't love it. And the more I think about it, the less I like it.

This is How You Lose Her is the story of Yunior, his family, and his pathetic attempt at a love story. I didn't find Yunior relatable for most of the novel. And while most of the novel is from his perspective, there are some random chapters in the middle from other characters' perspective, and I'm not sure how they fit into the story. Those chapters were lovely, and when we went back to Yunior's story for the end of the novel it was a bit of a disappointment.

Now I didn't actually hate the novel as much as it's going to sound like I did. Diaz's prose is beautiful. The short story in the middle of a Latina washwoman trying to make her way in America was lovely. The characters were...dynamic?

****SPOILERS AHEAD*****

The washwoman's story: Her lover, Ramόn, has a wife who won't move to America. He talks of buying a house where they can live together but is still writing home to the wife. That relationship is foreign to me, why keep a wife while you're really with another woman? But at the same time I can understand it, a cross-continent divorce is probably difficult, and culturally may not be something Ramόn views as an option.

Yuniors story is less palatable. Yunior is devastated when the love of his life leaves him. She leaves him because she finds out he has cheated on her with over fifty different women. Call me a feminist (please), but I have no pity for him. And I barely feel like he learned his lesson. He couldn't get over her and took to running, which gave him plantar fasciitis so he had to quit, which lead to yoga, which lead to blah, blah, blah....

His married friend knocks up a girl back in the Dominican Republic. And I think it was supposed to be sweet how excited he was to have a son, but I was a little more concerned about his wife and daughter back home.

Call me a feminist, but I just couldn't like these men.

Original review (and so much more!) at janaslibrary.blogspot.com/2013/07/this-is-how-you-lose-her-35.html

I understand that Junot Diaz is an award winning, darling of the literary world. I understand that his books give voice to the immigrant experience, especially those of the Dominican Republic. Apologies, but I just do not care for the writing style. While in this book, some of the stories are written in more of a conventional style, most are written in a clipped, stream of consciousness babble. While it is important to be realistic, and to create impact, I believe the stories could have been told just as well with fewer graphic situations and foul language. When Senor Diaz just writes a straight descriptive sentence, the writing/imagery is exquisite. It is also frustrating for the reader when so much of the writing is in a foreign language, in this case , of course, Spanish. But in addition, so many slang words, that would be impossible for anyone except a Dominican to understand. Perhaps Mr. Diaz needs to reach a compromise in his writing style if he wishes to please a more universal audience.

I loved reading this, but I'm left a little lost. While it was easy to read and full of really interesting stories, I don't understand who Yasmin was or why she was in the book. I was also left confused about WHY Yunior is such a cheating womanizer. It seemed like even the author/narrator didn't have a good reason, just a lot of excuses about how life is full of mistakes that we keep repeating no matter what.

I read Junot Diaz’s collection, This is How You Lose Her, in the style of a novel rather than a short story simply because I could no put it down. I opened it up on my flight to New York City and had it finished not even halfway through the flight, which was both sad and astounding at the same time. I applaud Diaz for holding my attention completely for that long without any break.
Diaz somehow managed to craft an unlikeable character that was still enjoyable to read and that I was okay with not liking. Yunior is a sexist man, who refers to women as “b****es” and “sluts”, yet Diaz writes this way from a seemingly Pro-women voice, which was an interesting mix for sure.
Most of the stories seem to fit together seamlessly, yet there were a few that just didn’t seem to fit with the rest.
Overall, lovely collection.

Great writing, great language, thoughtful, creative , insightful, it will expose you to a world not many people know, unless you are an immigrant living in New Jersey. Brutally honest, sensual, a great book.

This offers a raw, compelling perspective on Dominican immigrant life in New York and New Jersey, but it's hard to agree with professional critics who say this book is essentially about several experiences of love with two brothers as the central focus. It's definitely about several, even myriad, experiences of sex--but this is sex as ham sandwich, available at any 7-11 or AM/PM and just about as satisfying. This is not sex for comfort or for intimacy or as a reflection of a strong anchoring relationship; it's sex for the moment and simply because one can. If the author's point is that sex without meaning is hollow, he fulfills his thesis. But the rave reviews make me wonder what I'm missing.

I never read short stories. My sister recommended this and I wasn't that up for it, but I'm so glad I bothered. The perspective was far outside my usual box(es), but the voices were almost jarringly fresh and honest and it was fantastic to read something so different. I always feared I couldn't become invested in a short story so why bother. Wrong! Junot Diaz, thanks for schooling me.

Junot Diaz is one of the best writers today in American letters. His style is distinct and there is never a wasted page in his prose. I highly recommend looking into this talented writers growing catalog, including his work with the Boston Review. This is a great collection of interconnected short stories incorporating Dominican motifs that have become a fixture of Diaz's signature style.

I like Junot Diaz's writing a lot. I can't think of another writer with such a marked voice, so distinctive to him alone. Characters feel wholly authentic, and the world of Dominican immigrants in New Jersey is rendered with an absolute authentic sound; funny, painful, sexual in a very raw way, real. Still, it felt to me in reading these stories that Diaz is essentially repeating the same story over and over again. Maybe there's a point to that, maybe the immigrant story for Dominicans is essentially the same. Or maybe Diaz is retelling his own experience in these stories. At any rate, I enjoy the soul in his writing, the depth of spirit he evokes, the landscape of place, the sounds, tastes. Even the vulgarity, the sensual pain of it, feels wild-hearted and real. (If you take issue with graphic sexuality, this might not be the book for you. I've read some reviews here by readers who seem unable to get past the graphic nature of Diaz's writing, and who attack him for it. Too bad for them.) This seems to me a collection of love stories more than anything - particularly in the depiction of Yunior's relationship with his worshipped, ill-fated brother. What an exciting writer Diaz is, how fearless. I think it's cool that he teaches at MIT, too. What lucky students there. (Edited 10-1-12: congrats on your genius grant, Junot.)

It's an easy read, but this is far from Díaz's best work. He manages to write incredibly unlikeable characters who mistreat women and blame everyone but themselves for it. There is never a learning moment. No character development. No change. Why bother?

It's a quick read -- you'll be done in 2 days. But I came away disgusted with Dominicans. I was hoping NOT to have my stereotypes about Latin/Hispanic people reinforced, but this book reinforced them all. The men are disgusting, STD-filled cheaters who will cheat for years and years and then when the woman finds out, he will cry like a little b*tch about how much he "loves" her. The women are passive, poverty rats who get pregnant as soon as possible with a dirty Latin/Hispanic guy who shows her no respect, so they can wallow in more poverty.

So, yay for well-written stereotypes I guess?

I read a lot. I would give this book a zero if the option was there. No flow, boring, gross, disjointed and just a complete mess. I didn't give up reading it and finished it and I felt like I completely wasted my time.

Diaz's voice is here. There are moments when he comes out with something that is straight up brilliant. But for the most part it's just drivel and poorly put together. Consequence is only really apparent through the title of the collection itself and nothing is ever given enough time to develop significance.

Do you remember when you first read a story that was both close to your life, to the language you heard on the schoolyard and at the breakfast table and also the beautiful words you read in the books from the library? The one a language of closeness, that was more air than language because you heard it all the time, and it was part of you, a comfort. The other, the words in books, made you sometimes shiver they were so magical. Then you read something that had them both, and you understood that any language could be wonderful in the hands of a magician? Junot Diaz's first short story collection, Drown, published 15 years ago, was that magic in my life. Its been a long wait for a follow-up, and this book doesn't disappoint. Yes, there was the Pulitzer for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and yes it was well written, important, serious. But it wasn't magical like his short stories.

The narrator of all but one of these stories is Yunior, surely an alter ego of the author. And his voice, like the narrator in Drown, has the brain of a geeky smarty-pants and the soul of a puzzled, vulnerable Dominican kid who left the island, trying to figure it all out. No, not an original concept. But the stories don't rely on concepts, or plot. They are simply ideas told in a marvelously poetic voice. Poetic, but close to the ground. Real. His brother dies of cancer, his girl friend doesn't understand the island, and he doesn't understand her. He wanders the hood and goes off to college. At turns comfortable and alone. Sure of himself and puzzled.

But I have to give you the actual language, because that is where the magic lies. First the geek. The guy who reads and sees life sometimes through the reading. "A lot of the time she Bartlebys me, says, No, I'd rather not." Yunior takes his love back to the island, to see his abuelo and hang. But no, she wants the AC and the resort. And what a resort. The nightclub is named Club Cacique. And has one of those white, white sand beaches. "Every fifty feet there's at least one Eurof..k beached out on a towel like some scary pale monster that the sea's vomited up. They look like philosophy professors, like budget Foucaults, and too many of them are in the company of a dark-as..d Dominican girl. I mean it, these girls can't be no more than sixteen." "Muscles on his chest and abdomen so striated they looked like something out of a Frazetta drawing."

But then there is the magic of language close to the heart, language you hear on the street, that has no need to show off or prove something...

A lot of the Dominican girls in town were on some serious lockdown--we saw them on the bus and at school and maybe at the Pathmark, but since most families knew exactly what kind of tígueres were roaming the neighborhood these girls weren't allowed to hang out.

Here is what the wife looks like. She is small with enormous hips and has the grave seriousness of a woman who will be called doña before she's forty. I suspect if we were in the same life we would not be friends.

I'm truly happy for him. You did it, mi amor. We did it, he says quietly. Now we can begin. Then he puts his head down on the table and cries.

I don't even want to tell you where we're at. We're in Casa de Campo. The Resort That Shame Forgot. The average as...le would love this place. It's the largest, wealthiest resort on the Island, which means it's a god...n fortress, walled away from everybody else. Guachimanes and peacocks and ambitious topiaries everywhere. Advertises itself in the States as its own country, and it might as well be. Has its own airport, thirty-six holes of golf, beaches so white they ache to be trampled, and the only Island Dominicans you're guaranteed to see are either caked up or changing your sheets. Let's just say my abuelo has never been here, and neither has yours. This is where the Garcías and the Colóns come to relax after a long month of oppressing the masses, where the tutumpotes can trade tips with their colleagues from abroad. Chill here too long and you'll be sure to have your ghetto pass revoked, no questions asked.

Please Junot. Write a little faster. Fifteen years is way too long to wait.

I'm going to be blunt here: if This is How You Lose Her isn't already on your reading list, add it. Immediately. Mark my words, it will be appearing on numerous top ten lists for 2012--which is exactly where it belongs.

This is How You Lose Her is luminous. Tremendous. Basically, if you can think of a positive affirmation that ends in '-ous,' it applies. In it, Junot Díaz returns to the short story form of his first book, Drown, spinning tales of love and (mostly) loss in a transcendent style that lays bare the longing, the hope, and the weaknesses of the human heart. And it's funny, too.

I first discovered Junot Díaz when The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was released back in 2007. I was astounded. It was fantastic, and Díaz was so different from any other writer out there. His voice, his characters ... to say that they're like a breath of fresh air is like saying that a glass of water might be nice after a jaunt through the desert. It's not that there aren't any other good writers out there (Hilary Mantel and Jennifer Egan come to mind), it's that Díaz is capturing a point of view that is criminally under-represented in fiction--and he's doing it with panache. Yes, authors like Jhumpa Lahiri have tackled the immigrant experience, and well, but these are not the emotionally repressed, Ivy League-educated denizens of a Lahiri story. These are fiery inner city residents who live and love and curse and screw up with astonishing ferocity and frequency.

Fans of Oscar will be glad to know that Yunior--a young Dominican man born in the DR but raised in New Jersey (perhaps a stand-in for Díaz himself)--is back, framing all but one of the stories in this collection. Through the course of these nine stories we meet Yunior's family, profoundly experience the pain of losing his brother to cancer, and learn about his hopes and dreams even as he hopelessly screws them all up. The chronology of Yunior's life doesn't always add up (in one story his brother Rafa is still alive when Yunior is 17, in another Rafa dies much earlier, for example), but it doesn't matter much. Each story is almost dreamlike anyway, so you just go along for the ride and enjoy. Just like you can't help but love Yunior despite his foibles. Haven't we all, at some point in our lives, not wanted to be a bad guy even as we've actively screwed things up?

Díaz continues to be in top form on every page. I actually ended up reading this collection three times: the first time slowly, to savor every sentence; the second time with an almost manic determination to relive the experience; then I actually went back a third time, armed with a pen to write down my favorite lines on an index card (I ended up needing two of them, despite my ridiculously tiny handwriting). There's so much that is funny and profound, and often at the same time. Describing the Dominican Republic, Yunior remembers mosquitoes that "hum like they're about to inherit the earth." Then he recalls a lost love whose posterior "seems to exist in a fourth dimension beyond jeans." On family: "My mom wasn't the effusive type anyway, had one of those event-horizon personalities--s___ just fell into her and you never really knew how she felt about it." On family legacy (destiny?): "Maybe if you were someone else you'd have the discipline to duck the whole thing, but you are your father's son and your brother's brother."

I recommended the hell out of Oscar Wao when it first came out and I'll be doing the same for this book (it's times like these I really miss working in a bookstore). This one would probably be easier to sell, too. Oscar was never exactly a book club type of book, I guess, and most women I know who read it were a little confused. This is How You Lose Her should be a lot more accessible for all audiences.

I wasn't kidding when I said that you should put this at the top of your reading list. So what are you waiting for?

Grade: A

I didn't realize how sexually explicit the book was going to be, but the overall storyline was good. I was initially intrigued by the book because my boyfriend of 3 years is a minority (Puerto Rican), and came from a lower economic status. He was also a womanizer back in his hey day. I thought it might help me to better understand his upbringing, and his past relationships.

While I was not familiar with Diaz, I read reviews and thought I would move out of my literary comfort zone to try this book. I am so glad I did! It was a refreshing, insightful, moving take on a culture and topic that is not readily addressed in today's society...relationships and how we treat each other. I believe these stories said as much about women as they did about men. This book is thought-provoking and entertaining! Definitely worth the read.

Interesting and different. I almost put it down but really felt pressured because of all the praise it's received. I am glad I finished it. You really need to read all of the stories to see how they all fit together and tie in. Overall the story is complex, but realistic. I enjoyed the characters and the structure.

This book is 'OK.' I finished it... mostly because it isn't that long of a read. The author did not do a good job helping you find reasons to like the main character. It is VERY difficult to get into a book where you do not want to see good outcomes for the main character. I have a decent command of the Spanish language so the bouncing back & forth didn't necessarily bother me, though it was sort of distracting. I also felt the book was overly raunchy. I understand the desire to set the scene, IF it enhance the read. Speaking about sex to speak about sex, mehhhh I'm not 14.

A little too honest at times. So many moments (as a woman) when you cringe, want to scream at Yunior. There are several quotes and pieces that stuck with me, that I am still mulling over days after finishing it. You know you will read this more than once. The life of a player, from A to B to X culminating in the final story. I loved at the end, when he finally looks at the book, the one that she created to break her own heart, and he finally sees himself, as she saw him; he feels what it was like for her and admits it. She did the right thing. That finally is him capable of true love, the selfless kind.

I loved the simple and spot on character descriptions. Diaz gets people and that translates across the page. In an unusual way, the story of Junior's life unfolds. We get snippets of a time in his life, and the lives of others, in what seem to be short stories, like an expanded Polaroid of each. Diaz is so spot on about other people, but leaves you wondering if he can see his own character flaws at all. Perhaps that's why his journey to a greater wisdom took so long. This is a slim book that is well worth the read.

As seen on The Bookish Owl (http://www.thebookishowl.net/?p=6975)

This Is How You Lose Her is a collection of short stories following Yunior, a man who is reckless but is in love with the idea of being in love. The stories are of the women he loves and ultimately loses, the last being the love of his life who completely destroys his heart. “[This Is How You Lose Her] lays bare the infinite longing and inevitable weakness of the human heart.”

Junot Díaz's "This Is How You Lose Her" pulsates with robust descriptions, dialogue, characterizations, and story lines. The dialectical language draws one into the complex, rough, loving, and dynamic Dominican communities. A thoroughly invigorating read.

This was one of the best books I've read in years. My other favorites in recent years, to give you an idea of tastes, include Love in the Time of Cholera (perennial favorite) and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.

(review by David's wife, we share this account)
Like DROWN, this collection of linked short stories chronicles the life of Yunior, a Dominican emigre to the USA. THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE HER picks up the story up during Yunior's twenties, painting a portrait of a guy with no visible anchor when it comes to relationships with women.

It's not for lack of trying, merely that he has only the most rudimentary grasp of what he's looking for, as though he's periodically asking, and then misunderstanding, 'what are women for'. His wit, serious character and island charisma mean that he's never short of female company, he knows how to attract the easy girls and the generous girls and even the ones who won't give it up so easy.

Yunior just doesn't know how to keep them. It's kind of funny but also heartbreaking to see how the only lesson he keeps learning is: THIS is how you lose her.

For a book that did only this, with the brutal honesty and charm of this collection, you'd give 5 stars. But where THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE HER transcends is in the clever portrayal of the experience of being part of the Dominican diaspora, and specifically, in the cold, unfriendly climes of New Jersey and then the (surprisingly!) blithe racism of Boston.

This is territory in which Junot Diaz has consistently excelled; it's also where his own, not entirely dissimilar life experience has been pure gold. By going back to Yunior's childhood, with tales like 'Invierno', and 'Miss Lora', and the stories about his evil brother's death from cancer, Diaz gently suggests reasons for why Yunior may have been set, inexorably, upon the path to perdition.

You feel for Yunior and want him to succeed, for his bruised heart to find love and understand how this time, to keep it.

As a first time reader of Junot Diaz's work, it was apparent to me from the first chapter that the critical-acclaim his novel has received is no fluke. I hungrily chewed through this read and my only disappointment was when I realized, too quickly to my taste, I was on the last page. I immediately downloaded his earlier work on my kindle so that I could hang out with "Yunior" for several hours longer. This is how you lose her is full of self awareness and poignant reflection mixed with spanglsh witticism's that evoke laughter and tears. At the end, I almost wished I was one of Yunior's "sucias". .

As a Dominican-American woman who was born and raised in Boston, now based in Cambridge (Hrvd Sq), 'This is How You Lose Her' is a picture perfect depiction of Dominican men and woman (to an extent) in this country. The culture that surrounds the lifestyles of Yunior and all of the women he encounters and surrounds himself with tell more about the Dominican culture than anyone or anything can describe in words. From Diaz's descriptions of white girls, to his depictions of Yunior's headstrong/reserved mother and her 'Hallelujah crew', could not have been described more perfectly. The diction in this novel is also carefully chosen to perfection and I found myself laughing-out-loud at many of the phrases and references made towards the culture. From the character POV to the chapter layout, all was well done. The raunchy love stories between each individual woman portrays the beauty and tragedy that embody all that it means to be a Dominican-American living on the East coast. In my opinion, many of the readers do not know enough about the Dominican culture in order to grasp the full realm of what Diaz was aiming to convey here. Outstanding read! Extremely recommended to all with an open mind and an interest in dipping into the culture and lifestyle of this ethnicity :) - See more at: [...]

I bought this for my boyfriend who is an English teacher. He loves Junot Diaz and has the softcover version of this book. He loved this collectors edition. I will say that the case the book come in is covered in fabric--very good at keeping the book itself protected from dust and wear but it might be hard to keep the case clean, so handle with care to keep it looking nice.

i really liked this book, it was fun to read and experience the main character - a Latin immigrant who is naive, yet experienced, ignorant, yet intelligent, raunchy, yet a hopeless romantic. a little hard to follow the different story lines sometimes because he jumps around and begins chapters with no reference, or not enough for me at first, but i can't wait to read more of this author's writing.

Have you ever picked up a book and were upset when it was over? This is a book you will eventually read again. It does NOT matter if you don't understand all the Spanish slang. Diaz will take you on a journey with Yunior and all his ladies. From childhood til adulthood and not necessarily in that order. That's what I liked about it. Every chapter explored a different "chapter" in Yunior's love life. Also his relationship with his older brother was interesting. This is a good book if you are a busy person because of the short stories. GET IT!

I bought this book because of all the hype my friends were giving it. It sat on my shelf a few months before I even picked it up but once I did, I couldn't put it down. Each story resonated more than the last and I finished the book in three evenings.

I heard a lot of good things about this book, but it wasn't what I thought it would be. The writing was very familiar and I could not relate, or understand, much of the DR slang. I did however appreciate the sincerity and simplicity of the storytelling.

Beautifully written without a doubt! Filled with humour with a great twist! I love the theme, the concept of this book. The chapters will make you laugh but the story is heart breaking. What a great novel!!!

I've read many a lit read. From the classics to the contemporary. And though I really liked this writer when he started out with his first collection, I find that the same old schtick is getting a bit tiresome. Yes, he has 'voice', yes, he knows his corner, and his people, but they really are a grubby lot. And it gets old.

In DROWN I found the portrayals cool, and the prose, riveting and meaty. But here, it's just not anything new. And I agree that the depressing and abusive manner of the men toward their women, and the expletives is just extremely depressing and actually, predictable. The characters aren't likable, and that counts.

But foremost, Diaz doesn't move much beyond the same turf, same territory, and this tells me he's very limited as a writer. Because he won a Pulitzer, this work will make money, but there are better reads out there.

Though at first I thought it would be about the author's sexcapades, it has more to do with his family and his upbringing. Keeps the language simole. The book gives a good glimpse of immigrant life in their native country and the US

The book cover advertises that Diaz now "..turns his remarkable talent to the haunting, impossible power of love..." From his writing, I don't see any understanding of the meaning and experience of LOVE, just sex - hopping from one women's bed to another for no other reason than libido and mistaking it for love. I hesitate to ask whether that is cultural for fear of being labeled a racist, which I am not. I guess that is what passes for love these days, what a shame, and even more shameful that others buy into the sham. The writing didn't particularly turn me on, even when it was non-sexual. It appears to be autobiographical, which is fine, but from reading this book I don't see that the author is any better man from his experiences, nothing learned. If you must read this, get it from the library and save your money for a book that teaches us about learning some of the elements of love, aside from sex--- devotion, sacrifice, loyalty through good times and bad. That would be enlightening, which this book is not.

I was happy to see that Junot continues to write . I live in Central Jersey and at times it got to be my own past life experiences written on a book. I was looking for more. My father worked in the same metal factory Premier Die Casting in Avenel, NJ. If you want to remember the 1970's is good.