In ''Fiesta, 1980,'' the partly assimilated Yunior sneeringly describes his relatives' apartment in the Bronx as ''furnished in Contempory Dominican Tacky.'' Conversely, the narrator of ''Edison, New Jersey,'' who delivers pool tables to homes in upscale suburbs, marvels at such exotic specimens as ''ladies in slacks and silk tops'' with ''court case names: Wooley, Maynard, Gass, Binder.'' And the voice Mr. Diaz's major characters - feel at a remove from whatever their surroundings may be. (We like Yunior too much to want to think he's the small-time drug dealer in ''Aurora'' or the lovelorn sot and dope smoker in ''Boyfriend,'' who mopes around eavesdropping on his beautiful downstairs neighbor.)Īll these narrators - indeed, all Mr. 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. 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. Diaz is smart enough to play his hand for all it's worth. Mainstream American literature from William Bradford to Toni Morrison has always been obsessed with outsiders its Hucks and Holdens are forever duking it out with the King's English, and writers as different as Ezra Pound, Zora Neale Hurston and Donald Barthelme have delighted in defiling the pure well with highbrow imports, nonstandard vernacular and Rube Goldberg coinages.

Diaz is worried about as a writer, he's been dealt an ace. The young Dominican-American writer Junot Diaz begins his first collection of stories with an epigraph from the Cuban poet Gustavo Perez Firmat to the effect that writing in English ''already falsifies what I / wanted to tell you.'' For readers with a taste for paradox, it makes an enticing invitation.

Junot diaz aurora