The Outsider Is In: An Immigrant's Stories

"My nerd part was my secret identity," he says.

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'How Does It Feel . . . ?'

Díaz is a trim man of 38 with a not-quite-shaved head and a small, neat beard. He wears jeans and a colorful striped shirt (untucked) and this day gives off no hyper-male vibes, unless you count the swear words with which he reflexively laces both writing and conversation.

His father, a veteran of the Dominican military, "was so [expletive] masculine," Díaz says. "He was into boxing, he got a black belt in judo when I was, like, 10. . . . He was very much a public tough guy, my dad."

The elder Díaz preceded the rest of the family to the United States, leaving his wife and children to make do as best they could. (His mother found a low-wage job in a chocolate factory.) After he finally brought them to New Jersey, he left them again.

The middle of five children, Díaz says he started writing "because I read so damned much. I just wanted to participate in this thing that I loved."

In high school he tried to write a horror novel, a la Stephen King. "It didn't work." In college, at Rutgers, he discovered creative writing classes. He wrote for hours every day. "It was all junk," he says now, "but it was like this dream."

A few years later, the dream came explosively true.

Díaz had honed his writing skills in grad school at Cornell, sent out reams of short fiction to magazines that ignored it, worked multiple dead-end jobs. Then one day he got a call from the editor of Story magazine, who'd been struck by the power and freshness of his voice. Before long he had an agent and a collection of linked stories up for auction. Riverhead bought it as part of a six-figure, two-book deal.

Published in 1996, "Drown" drew far more attention than your average debut.

"Díaz has the dispassionate eye of a journalist and the tongue of a poet," said Newsweek. And: "Talent this big will always make a noise."

"So, Junot Diaz, How Does It Feel to Be a Literary Sensation?" read a headline in the Los Angeles Times.

"Drown," as the author told the Times of London, was both "deeply fictional and deeply autobiographical." The first-person narrator -- sometimes unnamed, sometimes called Yunior -- appears both as a child in the Dominican Republic and as a tough, troubled immigrant kid trying to make his way in New Jersey. In one story, he shoplifts, deals dope and becomes estranged from an older friend who's chosen college. In another, "How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie," he parses race and class complications in the world he's been forced to adopt. In a third, he tries, with some difficulty, to present his family narrative from his father's point of view.