Laila Lalami reports on Junot Diaz’s recent reading in Los Angeles.
Diaz, whose Drown knocked my fucking socks off, read from his “novel-in-progress … about a 15 year old pregnant girl whose boyfriend is a 40 year old gangsta set in 1961 in the Dominican Republic, immediately before dictator Rafael Trujillo is assassinated. He read a scene where Belizia, the girl, is severely beaten in a cane field and loses the child she’s carrying.”