Junot Díaz: By the Book

As a child, the author of the new story collection "This Is How You Lose Her" loved the unabashedly smart Encyclopedia Brown. "Smart was not cool where I grew up."

You've just recovered from back surgery. What books helped you get through it?

Man, you guys have some good intel. I have family members who only found out after the neck brace came off. But definitely, I read like crazy while I was laid up; reading for me is proof against anything, but especially pain. These books in particular gave solace: Two superb collections of stories, from Krys Lee ("Drifting House") and Tania James ("Aerogrammes"). Also Wasik and Murphy's "Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus." But really, the book that most lifted me out of my bent clay was Ramón Saldívar's "The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary." There's a reason Saldívar won the National Humanities Medal. His insights on Paredes's years reporting in Japan alone are priceless.

What's the last truly great book you read?

Katherine Boo's "Behind the Beautiful Forevers." A book of extraordinary intelligence, humanity and (formalistic) cunning. Boo's four years reporting on a single Mumbai slum, following a small group of garbage recyclers, have produced something beyond groundbreaking. She humanizes with all the force of literature the impossible lives of the people at bottom of our pharaonic global order, and details with a journalist's unsparing exactitude the absolute suffering that undergirds India's economic boom. The language is extraordinary, the portraits indelible, and then there are those lines at the end that just about freeze your heart: "The gates of the rich, occasionally rattled, remained unbreached. The politicians held forth on the middle class. The poor took down one another, and the world's great, unequal cities soldiered on in relative peace."

In fiction, though, the 'last truly great book' I read has to be Alejandro Zambra's "Bonsai." A subtle, eerie, ultimately wrenching account of failed young love in Chile among the kind of smartypant set who pillow-talk about the importance of Proust. You get the cold flesh of the story in that chilling first line: "In the end she dies and he remains alone, although in truth he was alone some years before her death." But only by reading to the end do you touch the story's haunted soul. A total knockout. 

Among the many books on your shelves are "What It Is We Do When We Read Science Fiction," by Paul Kincaid; "Shikasta," by Doris Lessing; "The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún," by J. R. R. Tolkien; and "By Night in Chile," by Roberto Bolaño. Can you tell us about any of those books — what you thought of them, what they meant to you?

Tolkien I grew up on, fed my insatiable Ungoliant-like hunger for other worlds; I was a young fan and yet, even as an adult, I continue to wrestle with Tolkien for reasons that have much to do with growing up in the shadow of my own Dark Lord — that's what some dictators really become in the imagination of the nations they afflict. "Shikasta" was a book I used to see at the library a lot when I was growing up but which finally came into my hands when I was in college. A strange anti-novel that purports to be the history of our world from the perspective of our sympathetic alien caretakers. "Shikasta" takes that sub-zeitgeist "theory" that God and his angels are actually alien visitors to its logical conclusion. Not the easier read, but the book had a lasting impact on me. I've always wanted to write something with "Shikasta's" scope, with its thematic and structural bravura. Alien ethnographic reports on our Old Testament history mixed with cranky letters home by overworked alien bureaucrats and a moving realistic journal written by a young Lessing-like teenager living in Africa in the years before a worldwide youth revolt — bananas stuff. As for Bolaño, what can one say? One of our greatest writers, a straight colossus. Is there really anything in print even remotely approaching "By Night in Chile"? For anyone like me obsessed with the interplay between the personal and the historical, "By Night in Chile" is a master class in which Bolaño manages to distill the perverse brutal phantasmagorical history of an entire continent down to 150 seductive pages. A halfhearted priest secretly teaching Marxism to Pinochet so the demon general might better know his enemy? Latin American letters (wherever it may reside) has never had a greater, more disturbing avenging angel than Bolaño. 

What was the last book that made you cry?

That's easy: the winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize, Eduardo Corral's collection, "Slow Lightning." When I finished that book I bawled. Wise and immense, but peep for yourself: "Once a man offered me his heart and I said no. Not because I didn't love him. Not because he was a beast or white — I couldn't love him. Do you understand? In bed while we slept, our bodies inches apart, the dark between our flesh a wick. It was burning down. And he couldn't feel it."

The last book that made you laugh?

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