2007-06-02
17 分钟This is the New Yorker out loud from the New Yorker magazine, I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at the New Yorker.
Each month we ask a New Yorker fiction writer to select a story from our archives to read and discuss.
This month, Edwege Danticat chose how to date a Brown Girl, Black Girl, white Girl, or Hafy, by Juno Diaz, which was first published in the magazine in 1995.
It was included in Diaz's first book, Drown, a collection of stories set in the barrios of the Dominican Republic and in the hoods of New Jersey.
Published by Riverhead, the book caused a sensation when it came out in 1996.
It's now in its 23rd printing.
The story is what the title says it dating instructions for a dominican teenager living in urban New Jersey.
If the girls from around the way take her to El Cibao for dinner, order everything in your busted up Spanish.
Let her correct you if she's Latina and amaze her if she's black, if she's not from around the way, wendy's will do.
This month's story was selected from the New Yorker archives by Edwidge Danticat, who has been publishing fiction in the magazine since 1999.
She is the author of several books of fiction, including Crick Crack, the Farming of Bones and the Dewbreaker.
In this year's summer fiction issue, we published a piece adapted from her forthcoming memoir, Brother I'm dying, about her family in Haiti.
I asked Edwidge Danticat why she chose this story.
It's one of those stories that you like in spite of yourself.
You feel like I shouldn't really laugh or I shouldn't really enjoy this character, but you do.
And part of it.
I think it's the voice, but also the mix of both bravado, sort of this machismo, and this kind of vulnerability that this character shows throughout the entire story.
I'll talk with Edwicz Danticat again later in the program, but first, here's a recording made in 1998 of Juno Diaz reading his story, how to date a brown girl, black girl, white girl or Haffyen.
Wait for your brother, your sisters, and your mother to leave the apartment.
You've already told them that you're feeling too sick to go to Union City to visit that Tia who likes to squeeze your nuts.