Junot Díaz

(image by Lily Oei)

Following up on a hit book is tough. It took Junot Díaz eleven years to publish the novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, his first since Drown, a tough and elegant short story collection that made him the "it" writer among Latino readers and mainstream critics alike.

If you believe the hype (and maybe you should), the new novel could secure Díaz's reputation as one of the most important voices for a younger, browner, immigrant America.

Sancochado with Dominican history, comic book nerd lore, eternal curses, lovesickness and family dramas, Oscar Wao tells the misadventures of Oscar de León, a fat "ghetto nerd" who dreams of becoming the Dominican JRR Tolkien. In addition to Oscar, the novel follows the trio of powerful women in his family: his grandmother La Inca, his mother Belicia and his sister Lola. The language is a heady mix of Spanglish slang and SAT vocabulary, history and science fiction.

Born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Díaz migrated with his family to New Jersey at age six, and started writing as an undergraduate at Rutgers University. He wrote Drown, ten interconnected stories centering on the life and doomed relationships of a young Dominican-American man living between Santo Domingo and New Jersey, while he studied creative writing at Cornell University.

When Drown became a national bestseller the prestigious New Yorker magazine named him one of 20 writers for the 21st Century in 1999 and the book soon became a standard text for Latino literature classes around the country. While trying to get his second book off the ground, Díaz worked on the script for the 2002 indie film Washington Heights and taught creative writing at Syracuse University and at MIT, where he is currently an Associate Professor.

In the last decade, every interview with Díaz has referred to his apparent writer's block – could the man deliver on the great expectations he set up? It's a charge to which he has replied: "I was working on about three projects in that time, and they hit dead ends. I've been working on [Oscar Wao] for the last seven years."

And now that the wait is over? The "Oscar Wao" juggernaut is just getting started – already being praised as "funny, street-smart and keenly observed" by hard-to-please critics like Michiko Kakutani at the New York Times. Will Díaz go Hollywood? Nope, he's off to Rome to work on a science fiction book.

Being a Dominican "ghetto nerd" is paying the bills and then some.