The Tower of Alexandria

What happens when a writer disappears without scandal, censorship, or trial? This column explores the case of Junot Díaz as a symptom of an age in which readers no longer decide and literature is managed by algorithms and emotional curators. A critical elegy on omission as the modern form of punishment.

By Israel Centeno

Who truly misses him?

Who went back to a bookstore looking for him and found nothing? Who reread Drown or The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and felt not just literary nostalgia, but political anger over his editorial disappearance? Who, among all those who once quoted him, awarded him, studied him, has asked aloud: Where is Junot Díaz?

And more importantly: who could have done something about it?

We live under the illusion that the reader has the final word. That readers—either en masse or individually—determine the fate of books. That if a writer disappears, it’s because they deserved it. Because they failed. Because the public, as ultimate judge, cast them out.

But that illusion, if it was ever true, no longer holds. In the age of emotional algorithms and institutional curation, the reader is not sovereign—they’re a terminal user. They don’t choose. They are shown. They don’t decide. They are offered. And what isn’t offered to them doesn’t exist.

Junot Díaz wasn’t silenced by his readers. He was silenced before readers even had a chance to speak. He was removed from the conversation—not by decree, but by omission. Not by mass rejection, but by quiet curation. No one defended him because no one realized there was something to defend. And when someone disappears without protest, without visible censorship, most people assume: he must have done something wrong. And they turn the page.

We like to think the reader is sovereign. That they decide. That their taste rules. But that belief is part of the fiction that sustains the cultural industry. In reality, the reader is the last link in a long chain of decisions already made: marketing, critical validation, algorithms, social networks, prize circuits, thematic quotas, emotional trends. The reader buys what they see. And they only see what they’re shown. And what they’re not shown vanishes.

That’s why Junot Díaz disappeared quietly: because readers were never given the chance to miss him. Because instead of a public debate, what emerged was a fog—disinvitations without statement, awards withheld, silent removals. Readers didn’t cancel him. They simply stopped seeing him.

This isn’t new. Censorship has changed masks. Once it was decrees, blacklists, arrests. Today it’s metrics, “acceptable narratives,” curated lists, inclusion protocols. Books aren’t burned—they’re left unnamed. Writers aren’t banned—they’re omitted with progressive politeness.

And all the while, readers continue to believe they’re in charge. That their taste governs. That reading is free. But in truth, they choose from what has already been chosen for them, applaud what has already been approved, and reject what’s already been marked as “problematic.”

But there’s another figure, closer to the cultural power structure, who helps shape this erasure: the academic curator, the gatekeeper of the shifting canon. Some writers are punished not for what they write, but for not owing anything to anyone. For not kissing rings, not learning the dialect of academic cliques, not offering themselves up as convenient martyrs or networking favorites. And so, certain academics—not all, but those who distribute visibility with clerical precision—take their revenge not through criticism, but through omission.

In church, it’s called confessed sin. In academia, it’s called remembered sin. And the writers who were once inconvenient, who don’t belong to this group or that, who don’t play along socially, are erased with a smile and a panel on narrative justice in the spring calendar.

There is nothing more violent than a strategic omission. No punishment more effective than administered invisibility.

Meanwhile, those who conform, who owe favors, who recite the emotional script of the times, are amplified: in articles, grants, blurbs, fellowships. The reader doesn’t decide who appears in those spaces. The reader merely confirms what has already been decided.

Junot Díaz’s fall shows us that today, literature is no longer judged solely by aesthetic strength or symbolic value, but by its ability to fit frictionlessly into the dominant narrative. If you’re Latino but don’t turn pain into exotic packaging; if you’re male but don’t perform guilt; if you write from the margins but don’t enlist in the cause of the week—then you become illegible to the system.

And when that happens, the reader has no clue.

Because the reader is no longer sovereign. They’re a customer of curated sensitivity. And what doesn’t fit the current mood isn’t offered to them.

So what’s left for us? To resist from the margins. To write without asking permission. To name what others try to erase. And to remember that if the reader still wants to be free, they must learn to distrust everything handed to them already approved for applause.

Junot Díaz wasn’t judged by readers. He was removed before trial. And that says more about the system that vanished him than it does about him.

I don’t believe the reader has the final word.

But they can—if they dare—recover the first one