The faced want the faceless to be gone for good because they represent the worst fear: That you, too, might one day suffer this fate where all that defines you to the outside world is stripped away, where you are a stranger in a strange land-where you are unloved and unlovable. There is something within that facelessness, which makes the person all the more visible-scorned, pitied, hated, feared, and by some, treated with great kindness. You would think that facelessness is synonymous with invisibility, but here it is not. There are several recurrent themes running through this collection (the lost father, the regained father, the lost love, brotherhood, betrayal-often sexual) but the one I found most striking was that of facelessness. What a shit! We get used to the banal outrage of not knowing what this useless fool did when he got there, what was his big fat excuse, how could he abandon his wife and kids, etc etc so that there's a real frisson when we discover that the last 47 pages will answer all these questions, and in a great reversal of perspective, you find yourself looking out of this bad man's face, sleeping in his cockroach rooms and working his 16 hour shifts and against your whole will, you understand. Gloomily overhanging the earlier tales of kids trying to grow up in the Dominican Republic like a cloud full of bad rain is the father who left for America, who never came back, and who stopped sending money, and who never sent for his family to join him.

The best story is the last and longest, but only because of what went before.

Junot Diaz is the author, Drown is the book. A twist of brain and language, and eyes and heart and blood wrapped round it too. It's where no one but this particular author would know how to describe this person or that circumstance, this pain or that crime, the unique inside the generic. Now this is a thing you can't buy with money.

They're that too, just like This Old Heart of Mine is a great dance number, but there's this thing called an authentic voice, or whatever the term is. As when you're listening to some old piece of music you never thought much of, it could be a long ago seemingly throwaway pop dance number like This Old Heart of Mine by the Isley Brothers, or some slyer more college-degreed album track like (let's say) Life During Wartime by Talking Heads, and you suddenly jump up and think but - but really, this is a masterpiece! - it's not just another painting-by-numbers from Motown, it's not just another sneery too-clever construction you skip while you're trying to find Once in a Lifetime, Juno Diaz' tales from the front line of squalour and immigration aren't just another vicarious thrillseeking tour of Poverty-and-Ignorance Hell, not just another wound-baring stigmata-showing howl from yet more people from yet another abyss you wish you didn't know about.

Short stories by junot diaz