"Junot Díaz Hates Writing Short Stories"

"As Díaz pulled out one document after another, I got the sense that, if only he could have carried a big-enough folder — maybe one the size of a couple of continents — he would have packed in just about everything he has ever seen or heard or (especially) read: libraries of fan fiction, rusty knives, third-world crowds, petroglyphs, secret police. His work is defined by this kind of radical inclusiveness — the language of drug dealers and Tolkien dorks; the problems of destitute Dominican women and their more privileged American sons. This receptivity to all the possible sources of inspiration is what makes Díaz’s work both so distinctively rich and, it seems to me, so difficult for him to write. It’s like trying to distill the ocean down to a glass of water."

Sam Anderson interviews Junot Diaz for The New York Times magazine.

Césaire's "Notebook"

“I defy the craniometer. Homo sum etc. / Let them serve and betray and die / So be it. So be it. It was written in the shape of their pelvis.”

 - Aime Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (Wesleyan U. Press, 2001)