Hello and our

Hello and welcome to the next level podcast. I'm Tim Miller with my best friend Sarah Longwell and

our aspiring good friend Juno Diaz who's coming up next if you don't know

Juno he's a Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction writer his books drown the brief Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Weil, and this is how you lose

her, and highly acclaimed. I think they're great. Sarah's read them when she was a younger woman,

I thought that they were great. His writing is infused with a lot of

commentary in the immigrant experience and social issues. We get into that. He's got a

kids book called Islandborn, which I got for Toulouse, which we get into.

Sarah, what did you think?

So I hadn't read these books in like a decade.

Like I was trying to remember when,

so I had to go back and refresh.

Like, it was one of those things,

you know, you do this with an author, right?

You read one book and you think,

why I need to get my hands on everything this guy's written,

which is what I did. I read all his books, all at once.

I've loved his writing, but then like I hadn't revisited it.

So actually the best thing about interviewing him

was getting to go back and read some of that and remind myself of why I liked it so much.

And a lot of the reason I liked it is because it's writing like, you know whenever somebody, you hit a style and you're like I've never heard this style before it's lyrical he infuses Spanish with it in a way that you know for a what am I like a gringo, you can track.

But then, yeah, like, he hasn't really been in my consciousness.

...