The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
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Narrated by:
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Lin-Manuel Miranda
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Karen Olivo
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By:
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Junot Díaz
About this listen
Read by Lin-Manuel Miranda, the Tony Award®-winning creator and star of the musical Hamilton, and Tony Award®-winning actress, Karen Olivo. This brilliant narration adds another layer of lyricism and depth to this Pulitzer Prize-winning classic novel.
Things have never been easy for Oscar, a sweet but disastrously overweight, lovesick Dominican ghetto nerd. From his home in New Jersey, where he lives with his old-world mother and rebellious sister, Oscar dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fuku: the curse that has haunted Oscar's family for generations, dooming them to prison, torture, tragic accidents, and, above all, ill-starred love. Oscar, still waiting for his first kiss, is just its most recent victim.
Diaz immerses us in the tumultuous life of Oscar and the history of the family at large, rendering with genuine warmth and dazzling energy, humor, and insight the Dominican-American experience - and, ultimately, the endless human capacity to persevere in the face of heartbreak and loss. A true literary triumph, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao confirms Junot Diaz as one of the best and most exciting voices of our time.
©2007 Junot Díaz (P)2016 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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"Genius...a story of the American experience that is giddily glorious and hauntingly horrific. And what a voice Yunior has. His narration is a triumph of style and wit, moving along Oscar de Leon's story with cracking, down-low humor, and at times expertly stunning us with heart-stabbing sentences. That Diaz's novel is also full of ideas, that [the narrator's] brilliant talking rivals the monologues of Roth's Zuckerman - in short, that what he has produced is a kick-ass (and truly, that is just the word for it) work of modern fiction - all make The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao something exceedingly rare: a book in which a new America can recognize itself, but so can everyone else." (San Francisco Chronicle)
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Lauren Weedman is not okay. She's living what should be the good life in sunny Los Angeles. After a gig as a correspondent with The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, she scored parts in blockbuster movies, which led to memorable recurring roles on HBO's Hung and Looking. She had a loving husband and an adorable baby boy. In these comedic essays, she turns a piercingly observant, darkly funny lens on the ways her life is actually not okay.
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On his first night in his new home, Warren spies two figures in the grass outside; when he screws up the nerve to confront them, they disappear. The next day he encounters ghosts of a different kind: In the face of the teenage girl he meets at a comics convention, he sees the mingled features of his white father and his black mother, both now dead. The girl is his daughter, and she thinks she's white.
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Carlos Eire's story of a boyhood uprooted by the Cuban Revolution quickly lures us in, as eleven-year-old Carlos and his older brother Tony touch down in the sun-dappled Miami of 1962 - a place of daunting abundance where his old Cuban self must die to make way for a new, American self waiting to be born. In this enchanting new work, narrated in Eire's inimitable and lyrical voice, young Carlos adjusts to life in his new country.
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Excellent memoir of a forgotten time in history
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By: Carlos Eire
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To see a fortune teller or not to see one...
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Lifted by the Great Nothing
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Max doesn't remember his mother, who was murdered by burglars before they emigrated from Beirut to New Jersey. He lives with his father, Rasheed, who is enamored of his concept of American culture - baseball and barbeques - and tries to shed his Lebanese heritage completely.
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Stillwater College in Virginia, 1966. Freshman Peggy, an ingénue with literary pretensions, falls under the spell of Lee, a blue-blooded poet and professor, and they begin an ill-advised affair that results in an unplanned pregnancy and marriage. The couple are mismatched from the start - she's a lesbian, he's gay - but it takes a decade of emotional erosion before Peggy runs off with their three-year-old daughter, leaving their nine-year-old son behind.
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Misbegotten, mishandled, misfired novel
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The world renowned author of The Satanic Verses and The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Salman Rushdie is a Whitbread Award winner and recipient of the Booker Prize. His first truly American novel, Fury is a metaphorically rich black comedy that reflects the pressure-cooker of modern life. Malik Solanka, irascible doll-maker and retired historian of ideas, suffers the pain of wanting without knowing exactly what it is he wants.
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surprisingly good
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Davie—an ugly duckling growing up in small-town Mississippi—is positive her life couldn’t be any worse. She has the meanest mother in the South, possibly the world, and on top of that, she’s pretty sure she’s ugly. Just when she’s resigned herself to her fate, she sees a movie that will change her life— Sixteen Candles. But in her case, life doesn’t imitate art.
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2 High Fives - for Monkey Night
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Overall
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In her best-selling memoir North of Normal, Cea wrote with grace about her unconventional childhood - her early years living in a tipi in Alberta with her pot-smoking, free-loving counterculture family. But her struggles do not end when she leaves her family at the age of 13 to become a model. Honest and daring, Nearly Normal reveals the many ways that Cea's unconventional childhood continues to reverberate through the years.
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This one is just not for me
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When their hard-drinking but loving father dies in a car accident, teenage brothers Kyle and Klint Hayes face a bleak prospect: leaving their Pennsylvania hometown for an uncertain life in Arizona with the mother who ran out on them years ago. But in a strange twist of fate, their town's matriarch, an eccentric, wealthy old woman whose family once owned the county coal mines, hears the boys' story and takes them in.
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Tawni O'Dell Fan
- By bette on 09-20-10
By: Tawni O'Dell
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What listeners say about The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Wanda O.Hughes
- 03-06-17
Poor Oscar
the story is compelling. At times I got a little confused because it jumps around a lot. But I was definitely sucked into the magical energy of the curse in the family. so well-read too. Definitely worth a listen.
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10 people found this helpful
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- L. Carroll
- 01-20-17
A wondrous tale
I would never read/listened this book if I hadn't heard about the Lin-Manuel Miranda audiobook. I'm glad I stumbled onto it through Lin-Manuel Miranda. This is an interesting story and well written. I love the humor of the writing even though the story is at times quite dark. I have to admit my Spanish is not good enough for this book but the performance did relay a lot. My only complaint about this is something that may not be as bad if you actually read the physical book. At times I found it difficult to determine the narrator of the story. I will have to investigate this author further.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Marie
- 06-04-17
Wonderful book, with a great performance
This is a great book that follows the story of a family over multiple generations. It illuminates the private lives of the family members alongside the social and political backdrops of the Dominican Republic under dictatorship and New Jersey in the 70s-90s, and I'd recommend it to everyone. It's funny, heart wrenching, and beautiful. Besides the story, the performance itself is worth the listen. The primary narrator does a fantastic job bringing the characters to life. The only thing is, if you don't speak Spanish it's a little complicated to listen to; there is a lot of Spanish and Spanish slang mixed in. You can find super helpful translations online if you search for annotated Oscar Wao. I kept referring to those while listening and it worked out very well, but it meant I couldn't listen in the car or anytime I didn't have the internet handy. Still worth it and I'm glad I listened to the audio instead of reading it in print.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Mari Lovo
- 06-26-19
Great story with some historical info about DR
Great story and performance by Lin Manuel Miranda is very entertaining and engaging as the narrator.
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- Luz L. Camacho Estrada
- 02-03-19
Perfectly balanced
Light yet dense, not a fan of historic novels, this was excellent: the mix of history and pop culture, the languages. Great mix.
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- Maria Alejandra Vega
- 08-28-18
Amazing performance!
Lin-Manuel Miranda and Karen Olivo deliver this Pulitzer award winning novel with superb emotion. Aside from a few mispronunciations with some of the Dominican places and slang, the life of Oscar Wao has never been more wondrous with this performance.
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- Courtney
- 03-28-23
Narration is exceptional
I read this in college and loved it but couldn’t remember it well. Decided to do the audio version and it did not disappoint.
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- kmilesmcleod
- 06-15-24
Entertaining and thought provoking
Diaz takes the reader on a surprising, thought provoking and illuminating journey. He weaves Dominican history into a touching story about a family journey over three generations.
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- Caleb
- 12-03-17
Make u miss el patio in each of its chapters
It was weird. Different. But fun and funny. Sprinkle with magic and sci-fi while at the same time so damn accurate and truthful.
What did I love?
Each and every chapter were Lola was narrating
What did I like?
- The ubiquitous Dominican references
- The sprinkle of Dominican slang
- And Lin Manuel Miranda trying to pronounce things in Spanish which are not really Spanish but Dominican.
What I didn't like?
- Some of the shifting. Honestly I love a good complicated history line, with some shifting narrator. Damn that's my kind of shit. But every time the history started turning really political/historical I couldn't help but to roll up my eyes and doze off. I'm not sure if it was because of the story itself, or if it was because of that history teacher I once had that made me hate history or simply because it's easier to silently shame Germany and the Nazy for the holocaust but it's way harder to see our role in the our own Haitian holocaust.
Favorite Quote:
That’s white people for you. They lose a cat and it’s an all-points bulletin, but we Dominicans, we lose a daughter and we might not even cancel our appointment at the salon.
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- Aileen
- 07-23-20
This historically-tapped, sci-fi interwoven love story
Really enjoyed the story, the stories within the story and being able to relate in all my Dominican-ness. I’d get hung up on some mispronounced things by the narrator, but he did such a great job acting it out.
Worth the listen, no doubt.
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