The mighty Pulitzer Prize for fiction is the sort of impressive literary award that often arrives with the unclaimed baggage of expectations. ''What next?'' it demands hungrily. ``And when?''

Luckily for his sanity, Junot Díaz, who won the prestigious prize in April, has no trouble ignoring the burden of outside influences.

''I don't deal with it, because the way the sun blocks out the stars, my internal pressure blocks out any external pressure,'' says the author of the dazzling The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, who appears at Miami Book Fair International on Nov. 16. ``I'm a monster. I really torture myself.''

The cruel demands the 39-year-old MIT professor places on himself benefit his readers. Oscar Wao -- crude, hilarious, horrifying and ultimately shattering -- elicited praise from virtually every corner of the literary world, also earning the National Book Critics Circle Award, the $10,000 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the $10,000 John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize.

The novel meshes the story of the comic-book geek Oscar, imprisoned in his unhappy, sexless Fortress of Solitude, his Dominican-American family and the continuing effect of the monstrous Trujillo regime on their lives. Díaz deftly uses pop culture-laced footnotes -- ''Johnny Abbes Garcia was one of Trujillo's beloved Morgul Lords. Chief of the dreaded and all-powerful secret police (SIM), Abbes was considered the greatest torturer of the Dominican People ever to have lived'' -- to recreate a heady and original blend of science-fiction style and penetrating history.

''In the genre there's a way of communicating called the info dump. . . . It's a standard term,'' Díaz explains. ``Suddenly the narrative stops so the narrator can fill you in on information you otherwise wouldn't get and would need to understand the story. . . . In some ways the structure of this novel, if you step back, is a sci-fi fantasy. If I changed Dominican history to the history of the elves or Vulcans a lot of sci-fi fans would be familiar with the structure.''

That ''Morgul Lords'' shout-out, by the way, is far from the only pithy Tolkien reference. To describe a Trujillo flunky, Díaz writes, succinctly: ``Don't misunderstand: our boy wasn't no ringwraith, but he wasn't no orc either.''

Fukú -- ''a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World'' -- preys on the fantasy-loving Oscar, who never quite fits in, never quite grasps love. ``The white kids looked at his black skin and his afro and treated him with inhuman cheeriness. The kids of color, upon hearing him speak and seeing him move his body, shook their heads. You're not Dominican. And he said, over and over again, But I am. Soy dominicano.''

Oscar Wao is ''a head-spinning read, but I think it also totally reshapes the whole mold of the coming-of-age narrative,'' says Haitian-born author Edwidge Danticat, whose novels and memoir also eloquently document the experiences of people displaced from their homeland. ``[Díaz] takes the immigrant experience and turns all that on its head by mixing in all these other elements. The book has all these literary hijinks, yet it's still a book that you can read through with your heart in your throat, wondering what's going to happen next. You can read it on so many different levels and get so much out of it.''

And if you don't understand all the references to Watchmen or Akira, if some of the more colorful Spanish phrases elude you, fear not: ''It's OK if you don't fully grasp one part,'' Danticat advises. ``I don't have any science-fiction knowledge. And I still get it. It's lively and innovative; that's the charm of it.''

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