Drown (short story collection)

Drown

First edition cover image
Author	Junot Díaz
Country	United States of America
Language	English
Genre	Fiction, Short story collection
Publisher	Riverhead Books
Publication date	1996
Media type	Print (hardcover)
Pages	208
ISBN

Drown is the semi-autobiographical, debut short story collection from Dominican-American author Junot Díaz that address the trials and tribulations of Dominican immigrants as they attempt to find some semblance of the American Dream after immigrating to America. The stories are set in the context of 1980s America, and are narrated by an adult who is looking back at his childhood. Drown was published by Riverhead Books in 1996.

Drown precedes his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the short story collection This Is How You Lose Her. Drown is dedicated to his mother, Virtudes Díaz.

Díaz was born in the Dominican Republic and came with his family to New Jersey when he was a young boy. When asked if he remembers the experience, he says: "If I burn your entire country down, would you remember being six or seven? There is nothing like the trauma of losing one's country and gaining another. It makes recollection very, very sharp." Díaz's father came to the U.S. first, got a job at a Reynolds aluminum warehouse in Elizabeth, N.J., and Díaz, his mother, and four siblings followed five years later in 1974. The people living in his neighborhood, Díaz says, were "colorful, poor, working, and transitional," and the area itself was "no joke," but his family was "already accustomed to a very rough-and-tumble upbringing." Of himself, Díaz says, "I was a child. I didn't speak English, and I experienced the competitiveness of America, and it's a profoundly cruel childhood culture.”

Díaz attended Kean College in Union, New Jersey for one year before transferring and ultimately completing his B.A. at Rutgers University in 1992. Yunior would become central to much of Díaz's work and Díaz would later explain: "My idea, ever since Drown, was to write six or seven books about him that would form one big novel." He earned his MFA from Cornell University in 1995, where he wrote most of his first collection of short stories.

As David Gates wrote in his The New York Times review of Drown: "In five of these ten stories, his narrator is young Ramon de las Casas, called Yunior, whose father abandons his wife and children for years before returning to the Dominican Republic and bringing them back with him to New Jersey. In other stories, the nameless tellers may or may not be Yunior, but they're all young Latino men with the same well-defended sensitivity, uneasy relations with women and obsessive watchfulness."