
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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Critic reviews
"An extraordinarily vibrant book that's fueled by adrenaline-powered prose... A book that decisively establishes [Diaz] as one of contemporary fiction's most distinctive and irresistible new voices." (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times)
"Diaz finds a miraculous balance. He cuts his barn-burning comic-book plots (escape, ruin, redemption) with honest, messy realism, and his narrator speaks in a dazzling hash of Spanish, English, slang, literary flourishes, and pure virginal dorkiness." (New York Magazine)
"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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Story
When an industrial accident unleashes an "airborne toxic event", a lethal black chemical cloud floats over the Gladneys' lives. The menacing cloud is a more urgent and visible version of the "white noise" engulfing the Gladneys - radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, ultrasonic appliances, and TV murmurings - pulsing with life yet suggesting something ominous.
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Designed to be analyzed by an English class
- By RI in Canada on 10-15-16
By: Don DeLillo
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The People We Keep
- By: Allison Larkin
- Narrated by: Julia Whelan
- Length: 11 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Little River, New York, 1994: April Sawicki is living in a motorless motorhome that her father won in a poker game. Failing out of school, picking up shifts at a local diner, she’s left fending for herself in a town where she’s never quite felt at home. When she “borrows” her neighbor’s car to perform at an open mic night, she realizes her life could be much bigger than where she came from. After a fight with her dad, April packs her stuff and leaves for good, setting off on a journey to find a life that’s all hers.
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Absolutely loved this book!
- By chatteycathi on 08-09-21
By: Allison Larkin
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The History of a Difficult Child
- A Novel
- By: Mihret Sibhat
- Narrated by: Waceke Wambaa
- Length: 13 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Wisecracking, inquisitive, and bombastic, Selam Asmelash is the youngest child in her large, boisterous family. Even before she is born, she has a wry, bewitching omniscience that animates life in her Small Town in southwestern Ethiopia in the 1980s. Selam and her father listen to the radio in secret as the socialist military junta that recently overthrew the government seizes properties and wages civil war in the North. The Asmelashes, once an enterprising, land-owning family, are ostracized under the new regime.
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Intriguingly Unusual
- By Mule Maven on 10-07-23
By: Mihret Sibhat
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The Invisible Woman
- By: Erika Robuck
- Narrated by: Caroline Hewitt
- Length: 10 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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France, March 1944. Virginia Hall wasn't like the other young society women back home in Baltimore - she never wanted the debutante ball or silk gloves. Instead, she traded a safe life for adventure in Europe, and when her beloved second home is thrust into the dark days of war, she leaps in headfirst. Once she's recruited as an Allied spy, subverting the Nazis becomes her calling. But even the most cunning agent can be bested, and in wartime trusting the wrong person can prove fatal.
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A book that holds one's attention.
- By Dawn T. on 06-07-21
By: Erika Robuck
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My Name Is Venus Black
- A Novel
- By: Heather Lloyd
- Narrated by: Alex McKenna, Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 11 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Venus Black is a straitlaced A student fascinated by the study of astronomy - until the night she commits a shocking crime that tears her family apart and ignites a media firestorm. Venus refuses to talk about what happened or why, except to blame her mother. Adding to the mystery, Venus’ developmentally challenged younger brother, Leo, goes missing. More than five years later, Venus is released from prison with a suitcase of used clothes, a fake identity, and a determination to escape her painful past.
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Loved it!
- By Yikes on 03-24-18
By: Heather Lloyd
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The Girl Before
- By: Rena Olsen
- Narrated by: Brittany Pressley
- Length: 12 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Clara Lawson is torn from her life in an instant. Without warning, her home is invaded by armed men, and she finds herself separated from her beloved husband and daughters. The last thing her husband yells to her is to say nothing. In chapters that alternate between past and present, the novel slowly unpeels the layers of Clara's fractured life. We see her growing up, raised with her sisters by the stern Mama and Papa G, becoming a poised and educated young woman, falling desperately in love with the forbidden son of her adoptive parents.
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Darkness before the dawn
- By Janice on 09-26-16
By: Rena Olsen
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The Narrow Road to the Deep North
- By: Richard Flanagan
- Narrated by: David Atlas
- Length: 14 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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August, 1943: Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his affair with his uncle’s young wife two years earlier. His life, in a brutal Japanese POW camp on the Thai-Burma Death Railway, is a daily struggle to save the men under his command. Until he receives a letter that will change him forever.
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The vanity and stupidity of the author
- By Off The Grid on 01-12-24
By: Richard Flanagan
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Toto
- By: A. J. Hackwith
- Narrated by: André Santana
- Length: 10 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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I was mostly a Good Dog until they sold me out to animal control, okay? But if it’s a choice between Oz, with its creepy little singing dudes, and being behind bars in gray old Kansas, I’ll choose the place where animals talk and run the show for now, thanks. It’s not my fault that the kid is stuck here too, or that she stumbled into a tug-of-war over a pair of slippers that don’t even taste good. Now one witch in good eyeliner calls her pretty and we’re off on a quest? Teenagers.
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Keep an open mind and enjoy the ride
- By Robert K Keim on 01-04-25
By: A. J. Hackwith
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Pretty Things
- A Novel
- By: Janelle Brown
- Narrated by: Julia Whelan, Lauren Fortgang, Hillary Huber
- Length: 16 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Nina once bought into the idea that her fancy liberal arts degree would lead to a fulfilling career. When that dream crashed, she turned to stealing from rich kids in LA alongside her wily Irish boyfriend, Lachlan. Nina learned from the best: Her mother was the original con artist, hustling to give her daughter a decent childhood despite their wayward life. But when her mom gets sick, Nina puts everything on the line to help her, even if it means running her most audacious, dangerous scam yet.
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SO GOOD
- By sandraleeweston on 04-28-20
By: Janelle Brown
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There Are Rivers in the Sky
- A Novel
- By: Elif Shafak
- Narrated by: Olivia Vinall, Elif Shafak
- Length: 16 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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In the ancient city of Nineveh, on the bank of the River Tigris, King Ashurbanipal of Mesopotamia, erudite but ruthless, built a great library that would crumble with the end of his reign. From its ruins, however, emerged a poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh, that would infuse the existence of two rivers and bind together three lives. In 1840 London, Arthur is born beside the stinking, sewage-filled River Thames. With an abusive, alcoholic father and a mentally ill mother, Arthur’s only chance of escaping destitution is his brilliant memory.
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I am 81 years old. Profoundly moved from this book. Plan to get my first tattoo.
- By mary e hennessy on 10-21-24
By: Elif Shafak
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The Paris Bookseller
- By: Kerri Maher
- Narrated by: Lauryn Allman
- Length: 10 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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When bookish young American Sylvia Beach opens Shakespeare and Company on a quiet street in Paris in 1919, she has no idea that she and her new bookstore will change the course of literature itself. Shakespeare and Company is more than a bookstore and lending library: Many of the prominent writers of the Lost Generation, like Ernest Hemingway, consider it a second home.
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a little much on the intimate details
- By LuckyL42 on 02-07-22
By: Kerri Maher
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Minor Dramas & Other Catastrophes
- By: Kathleen West
- Narrated by: Julia Whelan
- Length: 11 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Isobel Johnson has spent her career in Liston Heights sidestepping the community’s high-powered families. But when she receives a threatening voicemail accusing her of anti-Americanism and a liberal agenda, she’s in the spotlight. Meanwhile, Julia Abbott, obsessed with the casting of the school’s winter musical, makes an error in judgment that has far-reaching consequences for her entire family.
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Julia Whelan makes all books great!
- By Ellen Zelda on 02-19-20
By: Kathleen West
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The Circus Train
- By: Amita Parikh
- Narrated by: Imogen Church
- Length: 14 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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1938. Lena Papadopoulos has never quite found her place within the circus, even as the daughter of the extraordinary headlining illusionist, Theo. Brilliant and curious, Lena—who uses a wheelchair after a childhood bout with polio—yearns for the real-world magic of science and medicine, her mind stronger than the limitations placed on her by society. Then her unconventional life takes an exciting turn when she rescues Alexandre, an orphan with his own secrets and a mysterious past.
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Beautiful
- By Lisa M. Jolley on 03-19-23
By: Amita Parikh
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The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane
- By: Lisa See
- Narrated by: Ruthie Ann Miles, Kimiko Glenn, Alex Allwine, and others
- Length: 14 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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The thrilling new novel from number-one New York Times best-selling author Lisa See explores the lives of a Chinese mother and her daughter who has been abandoned and adopted by an American couple.
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***EXCELLENT*** Six stars if I could !!
- By ROBIN on 04-10-17
By: Lisa See
Poor Oscar
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A wondrous tale
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Wonderful book, with a great performance
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Great story with some historical info about DR
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Perfectly balanced
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Amazing performance!
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Narration is exceptional
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Entertaining and thought provoking
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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.
Make u miss el patio in each of its chapters
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And the National history, woven with family history, woven with personal history so well done.
Ok I gotta start listening all over again
So good on so many levels !
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