Is that a book you're reading?

The one causing you to turn somersaults at some newly realized literary intersection? The one where the bicycle built for two, carrying Caribbean and Latin magical realism, ran a red light and smashed into a bus full of urban/hip-hop kids being driven by Holden Caulfield and chaperoned by Ignatius Reilly?

If that sounds ludicrously convoluted, that's because only author Junot Díaz can actually pull off something like that - as with his 2008 Pulitzer-winning novel, "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao."

Díaz, a professor of creative writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will read and sign books Wednesday at Connecticut College in New London.

Born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey, Díaz has a master's in fine arts from Cornell and made an immediate critical splash when his first book, a collection of short stories called "Drown," was published in 1997. His stylistic efforts are dazzling reductions of all manners of influences, combined with a poignant and innate sense of storytelling that transcends culture.

Eleven years later, he finished and published "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao." The title character is a 300-pound, "lovesick ghetto nerd" who aspires to write Latin fantasy novels even as his family fights what appears to be a dark spell cast upon them from their native Dominican Republic. As a fusion of diverse influences and contemporary wit and pop culture, it's unique.

Last week, Díaz answered five questions via e-mail.

1 Reviews of "Oscar" frequently compared it to Michael Chabon, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers and so on. Much of your novel, though, is set in the Dominican Republic and immersed in Latin culture - and I didn't see many allusions to the Latin American literary tradition from the critics. Does Latin American fiction resonate in a big way with you?

A. It does. But also Caribbean literature. Writers such as Juan Bosch and Aime Cesair and Patrick Chamoiseau and George Lamming and clearly Derek Walcott were fundamental. It's nice to be compared to the local boys you mentioned, but really I'm not sure how accurate those comparisons are. Strange how no African-American or Asian-American or U.S. Latino writers were mentioned, and I feel like I have more consonance with these traditions than with the above-mentioned whiteboys. Those comparisons seems to deny all my real roots and also the kind of project I'm working on, which is so far removed from anything that the Chabons and the Eggers of the world are working on.

2 Oscar's world is massively impacted by his sister, Lola, and his mother, Beli - and their characterizations are remarkable portraits of women. Was it hard to write from their perspective?

A. You can't understand a person like Oscar without understanding the women in his life. The explanation as to what's wrong with Oscar (at the level of love - in other words why he has trouble getting girls) can be found by examining his sister and mother's experiences.

And you better believe it took a lot of work to get those two women right. A lot of rewriting.

3"Oscar" is so intricately plotted and works on so many levels that I have to feel you worked from a significant outline. How much leeway do the characters have to influence the direction of the novel as you write?

A. Alas, there was a serious design which the process often altered but that helped guide me all the times that I got lost - a design flexible enough for improvisation but organized enough to impart a complex structure on the whole proceeding. (It's ) part of the reason the damn book took so long.

4From the rhythms and poetry of "Oscar," music seems to influence you in a big way. If it's true, what would be on the "Oscar" mix-CD? And, in a more stylistic context, how much has music influenced your sense of dialogue and the street and even setting and geography?

A. There would be a lot of (merengue singer) Omega and (Basil Poledouris') soundtrack to the film "Conan the Barbarian." And really, how can one write an African Diasporic Caribbean novel without music filtered into nearly every word? Music rode shotgun on this novel. Everything from Lord Quas to Bonga.

5Don't be modest: how much of an increase in enrollment have you seen in your classes since "Oscar" blasted off?

A. Not very. At MIT it's all about your schedule. If your class fits in to an open period for a lot of students, you get swamped. If it doesn't, your class is quite small. But ever since the novel I get a lot of students coming in from Harvard and Wellesley, which didn't happen so much before.