New Faces Of 1996

A Deserving Dark Horse

JUNOT DIAZ'S SIX-FIGURE ADvance for a book of stories and an unfinished first novel looks like the literary equivalent of winning the lottery. After all, before the news broke last November, Diaz was just another 27-year-old fiction writer with an MFA, a stack of stories and a day job slaving over a copy machine. Now he's the latest overnight literary sensation. But luck had nothing to do with Diaz's success. He earned it with his talent. The 11 stories that Riverhead Books will publish next fall in "In the City of Boys" vividly evoke Diaz's hardscrabble youth in the Dominican Republic and New Jersey, where "our community was separated from all the other communities by a six-lane highway and the dump." Diaz has the dispassionate eye of a journalist and the tongue of a poet, and when he sheepishly wishes aloud that his debut had been "way quieter," he's just wasting his breath. Talent this big will always make noise.

© 1996