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When Junot Díaz walks into his apartment, stacks of books topple over and welcome him like pets. The “to-read” pile just inside the door—several stacks wide and several deep, with the tallest reaching about hip height—has collapsed in one corner. After picking up the books, the author, who has been an omnivorous reader since he was a child, lays the latest addition on top, capping it with a history book on World War II that had been waiting for him in the lobby.

Díaz won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction last year for his debut novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a multi-lingual, multi-generational story of Dominican fukú, a curse with a death grip even after the family of the eponymous Oscar has moved to the United States. His prose demonstrates his love of language and an acute sense of how it works—and how it can be pushed, threading hip hop vernacular and Spanish slang in sentences that spit as they sing. Traveling through a multitude of different milieux, the novel circles its protagonist with a fierce centrifugal force even as it encompasses an enormous number of footnotes. Though his first book, Drown, a collection of ten short stories that cohere into a nearly novel-esque whole, was a highly acclaimed best-seller, the release of Oscar Wao, his second book, eleven years later has made Díaz one of the world’s most celebrated authors living in the United States.

Sitting in his living room with views of Cambridge rooftops and towers all around, Díaz is clad in a black hoodie, jeans and his signature dark-rimmed glasses. The sweatshirt is embellished with a pin given to him by a student of his at MIT, where he was recently granted tenure. The pin is the size of a quarter, depicting a lion in a top hat. “A Dandy Lion. . . Terrible,” he shook his head as the cashier in the Harvard Book Store asked about it earlier in the day, cheerfully bemoaning the visual pun.

Looking at the books around us in the apartment, Díaz warns readers of Oscar Wao, with its allusive qualities and encyclopedic erudition in everything from island politics to B-movies, “The book obsessions of the novel have only a little to do with my own obsessions. I think that I read more about falconry when I was in sixth grade than I did science fiction.”

After moving to the United States with his family at the age of six, he learned how to read and began to tear through books. While still wrangling with English (learning to speak the language? “That fucking sucked”), the written word became his ally.

 “I just read everything. I think that for me it was just such a comforting rhythm. Words on a page. Me reading those words on a page.”

Though later on his own writing would be a site where the translated life was confronted in all of its complexity, in the beginning he says,  “I found reading to be such a great respite from the daily pain in the ass process of immigration. It was a place I could live in language without feeling my deficits. There’s nobody in a book that can tell whether you’re pronouncing the words right or not.”

“A typical hyper-lexic kid,” he read compulsively, in particular spending a lot of time with biographies and nature books—“You know, those kid biographies: The Lives of Great Men. And it was all men. And they were all white. They should have been more honest: the Lives of Great White Men.”

“I was obsessed with the United States wilderness,” he continues, self-mockingly enumerating their titles, “The Desert, The Grand Canyon…The Sea Islands of the Carolinas,” in the faux-soothing tones of advertisements promoting vacation spots.

“I think there was a part of me that was seeking an answer to the question who am I? How did a Dominican kid leave his island and come to New Jersey? And what is this place? I think a part of me was reading so compulsively because I thought that maybe there would be some code in one of those books that would explain not only explain this new place but would explain me. What I discovered is that there is no answer. . . It was the process that provided me with what I was looking for. There’s a great quote, which is about Gilgamesh, ‘the quest itself proves the futility of the quest.’”