THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF JUNOT DIAZ

You're mainlining mass culture, little junkie, with all that flashy cable TV infotainment entering your veins in a continuous and steady morphine drip. Even if you hate it, you can't help yourself, and your synapses are firing in time to the latest on Lindsay and Angelina and other daft celebutantes who are famous for being famous. You sense there is more to life...but what?

You know America's Most Idle, and it's various permutations, but do you know who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction?

This guy. A thirty-nine year old Dominican named Junot Diaz. He wrote a slangy Spanglish novel, giving us an outsider's perspective on life from the point of view of a fat uber-nerd named Oscar Wao who's into comic books. Don't worry, you won't have to read it. Reading makes your brain hurt. But you can watch these clips pretty easily. I suggest you do. The book is "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao."