You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

for you are the only animal, who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

This is Michael Silverblatt.

Today my guest is Juno Diaz.

He's the author of a book of stories, a first book of stories called Drown from Riverhead Books.

He's been the subject of a lot of attention since even before this book came out.

He was singled out as the savior of the next century or something

like that by Newsweek magazine.

Yeah, something ridiculous, I think.

I'm curious to begin with how I have a friend who only calls his books by one-word titles, Dennis Cooper with Frisk and

all of the others. What made you choose drown as a title? I think it goes to, I'm a terrible

person for naming my stories. Terrible. My stories, you know, if I don't focus in and just

get one word, the longer they are, the more likely there is that they're going to have a car accident.

So I tend to, you know, find one word just because, you know, otherwise I hang myself and drown

itself. I just loved that word and the way that word resonates

because you can't tell if it's a command, drown, or, you know, infinitive or, and I just, you know,

for a Spanish speaker, I can remember hearing that word the first time and how ominous it sounded.

And so, you know, outside of the sounds and how, you know, the play within it,

I also liked the way it worked in a story, which was about a people, a character,

a narrator in a situation where he felt just embedded, he felt almost paralyzed or couldn't get out of.

...