Junot Díaz in Limbo

Díaz reached the pinnacle of literary success with the publication in 2007 of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The Times wrote that the book was “so original it can only be described as Mario Vargas Llosa meets ‘Star Trek’ meets David Foster Wallace meets Kanye West.” The novel won a Pulitzer Prize, and, miraculously, skipped into classrooms and into the canon. It turned the prickly, depressive writer into a major public figure and got him a tenured position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.