Yunior de las Casas’s voice sounds like no other in contemporary fiction—peppered with profanity and slang, code-switching seamlessly between Spanish and English, the language of the streets and the academy. Over the course of three books, and nearly two decades, Junot Díaz has used the character of Yunior to explore the intersections between love and loss, displacement and desire, within the American immigrant experience.In This Is How You Lose Her, Díaz focuses on Yunior’s own life as a successful writer and college professor struggling through a series of passionate romantic relationships. From the neighbourhoods of Santo Domingo through the rough streets of New Jersey to every brick of Harvard’s halls, Yunior’s journey closely mirrors that of his creator. In This Is How You Lose Her, Yunior’s voice holds all of these worlds at once in a singular and intoxicating balance.The collection begins with “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars.” Yunior paints a cynical picture of the upscale Dominican resort to which his girlfriend has dragged him on the eve of their ailing relationship’s demise: “A goddamn fortress, walled away from everybody else,” with “beaches so white they ache to be trampled.” Isolated there, he finds himself surrounded by “Garcías and Colóns” who “come to relax after a long month of oppressing the masses,” and the “melanin deficient Eurofucks” who look like “budget Foucaults … too many of them in the company of a dark-assed Dominican girl.”In this passage, as in much of Díaz’s work, Yunior interrupts his narrative descriptions to directly address the reader—“Let’s just say my abuelo has never been here, and neither has yours,” and “Chill here too long and you’ll be sure to have your ghetto pass revoked, no questions asked.” This technique creates a sense of intimacy, at the same time foregrounding the fact that Díaz writes with a very specific reader in