The collection received positive reviews from publications including The New York Times, which describes the collection: "In the new book, as previously, Díaz is almost too good for his own good. His prose style is so irresistible, so sheerly entertaining, it risks blinding readers to its larger offerings. Yet he weds form so ideally to content that instead of blinding us, it becomes the very lens through which we can see the joy and suffering of the signature Díaz subject: what it means to belong to a diaspora, to live out the possibilities and ambiguities of perpetual insider/outsider status."[2]
The Telegraph notes of the collection: "Junot Díaz's short story collection is so sharp, so bawdy, so raw with emotion, and so steeped in the lingo and rhythms of working-class Latino life that it makes most writing that crosses the Atlantic seem hopelessly desiccated by comparison" and "Language is key. Díaz is both a minimalist—scraping, chiselling, honing his prose into its flinty essence—and a maximalist who's capable of code switching, flipping between the colloquial and the highbrow, creating a taut lexical calabash made up of Caribbean phrases, black American vernacular and the playful pugilism of urban street banter."[8]
Virginia Vitzthum, writing in Elle, praised Díaz's prose, but criticized his representations of female characters, writing that "we pretty much only see the women as exes, crying and screaming after they've been cheated on, or as new possibilities, cataloged in terms of their fuckworthiness."[9]
This Is How You Lose Her was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction (2012),[10] and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction (2013).[11][12][13]
