Drown (1996), Junot Díaz’s first published collection of short stories, was received with wide acclaim. The collection is semi-autobiographical, with the majority of its stories focusing on Yunior, who, like Diaz, is a young Dominican man who moved to New Jersey when he was young. Not all of the stories name Yunior explicitly as the narrator, but all except two (“Aurora” and “No Face”) could potentially be from his perspective. The stories are vulnerable personal accounts of a young man coming to terms with his identity and how he interacts with sex, race, class, and abuse in the world around him.
"Ysrael" follows 9 year old Yunior in the Dominican Republic spending the summer with his...
