"They meet in the final months of college, and by graduation, they have married. It's 1991. At age twenty-two, Lotto and Mathilde are tall, glamorous, madly in love, and destined for greatness. There are lean, romantic years that follow: potluck parties in a Manhattan basement apartment; a wilting acting career that doesn't pay the bills; a household that seems to run on good luck and good sex. A decade or so later, though, Lotto and Mathilde are...

"In the wake of a wildly disastrous affair, Willie Upton arrives on the doorstep of her ancestral home in Templeton, New York, where her hippie-turned-born-again-Baptist mom, Vi, still lives. Willie expects to be able to hide in the place that has been home to her family for generations, but the monster's death changes the fabric of the quiet, picture-perfect town her ancestors founded. Even further, Willie learns that the story her mother had always...

The lyrical and haunting story of a great American dream--the progress of a utopian community and its lasting impact on a gifted young man.

From a Nigerian boy's friendship with his family's former houseboy to a sweatship girl's experience as a sister wife, from love and murder on the frontier to a meltdown in academe, these stories, for Díaz, have the economy and power to "break hearts bones vanities and cages."