Diaz, Hernan

Hernan Diaz’s first novel, In the Distance, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award.  He has also written a book of essays, and his work has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, Playboy, The Yale Review, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. His work has been translated into more than 20 languages. In Trust: A Novel (Riverhead Books), it’s the 1920s and everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth – all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit. Diaz puts these competing narratives into conversation with one another, and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. Trust engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions at the heart of personal relationships, the reality-warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts.