NPR is running a series this week on Becoming American, featuring interviews with fiction writer. The program starts off on a high note today by talking with Junot Diaz, who moved from the Domincan Republic to New Jersey when he was six-years-old.
One way he adjusted to his new surroundings was through reading. "The solitude of being an immigrant, the solitude of having to learn a language in a culture from scratch, the need for some sort of explanation, the need for answers, the need for something that would somehow shelter me lead me to books," Diaz says.
Books about car engines, oil paintings and historical figures "became the map with which I navigated this new world," he says.
And as he grew up, Diaz says he came to see the United States as a composite of "multiple Americas": ones that were racist and xenophobic, coupled with Americas where anything is possible — where a kid can "come from a nonbookish culture and be transformed."
Listen to Diaz read from his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, over at NPR's Book Tour. The paperback of the novel was published in September.
Tomorrow, Jhumpa Lahiri will be spotlighted on the Becoming American series.
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