Within hours of finishing “This is How You Lose Her” (Riverhead Books, 213 pages, $26.95), the new book by Pulitzer Prize-winner Junot Díaz, I heard he'd been awarded a 2012 MacArthur Fellowship. That honor comes with a $500,000 no-strings-attached stipend. It is commonly - and certainly in this case, accurately - known as the “Genius Grant.”

A case could be made that that's all you need to know: Junot Díaz is genius.

But let me give you a few ways that genius is manifested. First, his voice is arresting. During the first few pages of the new book, which is a collection of linked stories, I found myself grinning widely as I thought back to how much I enjoyed “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” the novel that garnered Díaz the Pulitzer. I was so pleased to be reading his idiosyncratic style again. Raw, peppered with Spanish, free-flowing - this is prose that makes an impact.

From the early pages: “But then the letter hits like a Star Trek grenade and detonates everything, past, present and future. Suddenly her folks want to kill me. It don't matter that I helped them with their taxes two year running or that I mow their lawn. Her father, who used to treat me like his hijo, calls me an asshole on the phone, sounds like he's strangling himself with the cord. You no deserve I speak to you in Spanish, he says.”

The stories are connected by the presence of Yunior, the narrator of the quoted passage. But Díaz doesn't limit himself to a single perspective in this book. And here's the second manifestation of his genius - first person, second person, third person, male perspective, female perspective, it just doesn't matter. Indeed, the stories where the narrator talks to “you,” and “you” are either Yunior or a woman he is speaking to, are among the collection's most affecting.

These stories are full of both swagger and heartbreak. Yunior and his brother (among other characters) are Dominican men on the prowl, tallying up conquests and talking trash about women, even when they love them. Díaz delivers all of this brilliantly without ever making us disdainful of his characters. That's not easily accomplished, and it's yet another reason the man's a genius.