Laughing at the Expense of Tyranny
Junot Díaz (Santo Domingo, 1968) was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Drown; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and This Is How You Lose Her, a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist. He is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, PEN/Malamud Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and PEN/O. Henry Award. A graduate of Rutgers College, Díaz is currently the fiction editor at Boston Review and the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. https://www.junotdiaz.com/
Nineteen Eighty-Four is a novel that never stops giving, a novel that is always important to contemplate especially in societies like ours, so given to fascistic and totalitarian impulses, and in a conjuncture like ours that has only sharpened all these annihilatory impulses. Nineteen Eighty-Fouris less an oracle, or a window into the future, than…