Junot Díaz first published Drown with Riverhead Books in the United States in 1996. It quickly became a national bestseller and garnered almost immediate critical acclaim. Drown is a collection of short stories that are loosely tied together through the themes of Dominican identity, immigration, socioeconomic class, and family. The collection of stories includes Yunior, who also appears in Díaz's The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) and This is How You Lose Her (2012). Many readers throughout the decades of Díaz's career have picked up on the parallels between Yunior and Díaz himself (for example, Yunior's family members have the same names as Díaz's and they both move to New Jersey after immigrating to the United States as a child) and have therefore assumed that his fiction is semi-autobiographical. There are a wealth of other characters in Drown beyond Yunior, however, including Yunior's family members, Aurora, Beto, and Ysrael. Their stories are weaved together to create a patch-worked narrative that cuts into the heart of what it means to be Dominican in the Dominican Republic and in the United States.
There is no overarching plot in Drown, and instead, each short story contains its own. However, as Marisel Moreno points out in "Debunking Myths, Destabilizing Identities: A Reading of Junot Díaz's 'How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie,'" the text as a whole negotiates several powerful themes. "In Díaz's work," she writes, "issues of language, race, class, and gender acquire particular significance against the backdrop of extreme poverty, drugs, and criminality that is associated with inner-city neighborhoods such as Washington Heights, the largest Dominican enclave in the diaspora." Similarly, the literary analyst Ylce Irizarry understands "the primary function of Díaz's stories" is to elucidate "narratives of loss" which "expose the ideologies about immigration created within the diaspora or projected onto Hispanic Caribbean migrants." In this way, "Díaz challenges readers to question persistent beliefs about the American dream, the homogeny of Hispanophone people, and the interaction within minority communities."
Drown was nominated for several awards including the 1997 Quality Paper Back, and several of the short stories found in Drown were anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, 1996. When Drown was first published, The Philadelphia Inquirer lauded the short story collection as a stand-out as a "literary debut": "There have been several literary noteworthy literary debuts this year, but Díaz deserves to be singled out for the distinctiveness and caliber of his voice, and for his ability to sum up a range of cultural and cross-cultural experiences in a few sharp images." Newsweek named Díaz as one of the "New Faces of 1996," celebrating Díaz as having "the dispassionate eye of a journalist and the tongue of a poet." Similarly, the Boston Globe lauded Drown's prose style: "Graceful and raw and painful and smart... His prose is sensible poetry that moves like an interesting conversation... The pages turn and all of a sudden you're done and you want more." Finally, the New York Times placed Díaz among literary giants such as William Bradford and Toni Morrison whose work, like Díaz's, are "obsessed with outsiders." Moreno marks Díaz's Drown as an "entry of a previously marginalized ethnic literature into the American mainstream." According to Moreno, this "opened a path for a new generation of authors who write primarily in English and who have emerged from urban, working-class and transcultural backgrounds."
