The straight reviewers (meaning non-GR) have curled up and just about died of pure pleasure from reading this book, but I was not quite so jaw on the floor, for me it was a little bit Junot Diaz's difficult third album. 1996, 2007, 2012 - three books, not big ones either, in 15 years. If Junot Diaz was a singer songwriter he'd be Kate Bush. He takes forever on his stuff. It reads extremely fast, goes down like alcopop, but you know it's meticulous. He keens over every word, and the words are good. 
 I dock a star for three reasons. First, it's a stifling book. We're up close and breathing the frowsy sweat of the unloveliest parts of male macho attitude in all of these stories, every one. I found a quote from Diaz: 
 The question was always, for someone like me: What is the role of a male artist in the feminist struggle? We can't be feminists, I think. Our privilege prevents us. We can be feminist-aligned in some way. And so the women kept saying to us dudes, the best thing you can do is draw maps of masculine privilege. You can go places we can't. Draw maps so when we drop the bombs, they land accurate. 
 So, you can see these stories as accurate maps for the feminists, but cher professor, do they need any more maps?? Those feminists have had plenty to go on, all the way from Henry Miller to Brett Easton Ellis, their hard drives are crammed with gigabytes of misogynism, ain't no need for no more, I thinks. 
 On the other hand, you have to write what you know. That is so. 
 Second, and this is just me the Anglo Monolingual Saxon speaking, I found the many sentences like this a bit questionable - 
 Dude was figureando hard. Had always been a papi chulo, so of course he dove right back into the grip of his old sucias. 
 Yes, the authentic vibe, and all that, but it's spread on thick with a damned trowel just a bit. It's a humble reader opining here, what do I know, JD could slug me on the bean with his Pulizer any day. 
 And three, I have a personal beef with second-person narration - "you do this, you say that" which is employed way too much, although once is way too much for me. Why don't I like it? Because I keep snapping at the story "stop telling me what to do all the time!" 
 This is turning into My Year of Great American Short Story Collections so JD has got some serious, serious competition - Alyssa Nutting, George Saunders, Frank Bill, Jordan Harper and Donald Ray Pollock - and by the way it kind of bugs me that these writers (Saunders excepted) don't get none of the big yes! Yes! Yes! litgasm of love JD gets, he's good, great even, but so are these others. 
 This book is festooned with the kind of zingers which will put a smile on any reader's face : 
 In her mind a woman with no child could only be explained by vast untrammelled calamity. 
 Maybe she just doesn't like children. 
 Nobody likes children, your mother assured you. That doesn't mean you don't have them. 
 Or, describing a depression 
 Like someone flew a plane into your soul. 
 In this collection, JD gives us close-up focus on Yunior (his alter ego), his ma, his pa, his doomed brother Rafa, and their many girlfriends; the area of investigation is male sexuality, sub-category heterosexual, sub-sub category, Dominican, sub-sub-sub category American-Dominican. In fact the focus is so close that everything else is very hazy; in the stories about the grown up Yunior, it's only mentioned in passing that he's an academic; he seems to transform from ghetto boy to professor without any intervening stages, like Clark Kent nipping into the phone box. Well, it's not an autobiography. But it does seem to be semi-autobiographical, everyone says so, and therefore I wonder wonder wonder about the last story "The Cheater's Guide to Love" - even if only faintly factual it boggles my brain - could you really spoilery spoilery and your inamorata be completely ignorant about it? So many for so long? And yet she went to Harvard? If so, what does that say for the rest of us? 
 Answer : not a lot.