Fresh Air, Junot Díaz, October 18, 2007

Hear novelist Junot Diaz, critic-at-large John Powers, and world-music critic Milo Miles on this edition of Fresh Air.

Junot Diaz's new book is The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The highly acclaimed novel tells both a family and a political story set in the Dominican Republic and the United States. The narrative trips along in a slangy style that mixes Spanish and English. Michiko Kakutani, writing about Diaz in the New York Times, said Oscar Wao is "a book that decisively establishes him as one of contemporary fiction's most distinctive and irresistible new voices." Diaz previously penned the short-story collection Drown, published 11 years ago.

Then, John Powers tells us how the three-day March on the Pentagon, which took place 40 years ago in October 1967, inspired Norman Mailer to write his great book Armies of the Night. Powers says that while one could not consider the march a turning point in America's opposition to the Vietnam War, it served to galvanize the opposition.

Finally, Milo Miles reviews The Roots of Chicha/Psychedelic Cumbias from Peru. It's a new anthology of a previously obscure rock style. [Broadcast Date: October 18, 2007]