Just finished "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" by Junot Diaz ; it lives up to its publicity. Didn't know all that stuff about Porfirio Robirosa!! thought he was just a playboy/gigolo. Made his relationship with Zsa Zsa look clean by comparison.

Another, possibly better America-is-the-melting-pot author; Sigrid Nunez, author of "The Last of Her Kind" (title is taken from the author's introduction to Middlemarch); the autobiographical "A Feather on the Breath of God"; and "for Rouenna", about the army nurses in Vietnam.