New York ? Junot Diaz has just apologized  again.

The first time, the author worried he was being too self-absorbed. Next, he was sorry for stumbling over his words, something noticeable only to him. Now, he wants to say that he is usually much more fun than he was during an interview.

It’s as if he were atoning for all the praise he has received from the literary world.

Success has come quickly for the 33-year-old Dominican native, who was still in college when his work was first published and in his mid-20s when his story collection, “Drown,” made him one of the hottest young writers around.

Diaz’s stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including African Voices, The Paris Review and four times in the annual Best American Fiction anthology. His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Pushcart Prize for “Invierno,” published in The Pushcart Book of Short Stories, a selection of the best stories from 25 years of the Pushcart Prize.

Some of Diaz’s biggest fans can be found at The New Yorker, which published many of the stories that were later collected for “Drown” and included Diaz in its 1999 “The Future of American Fiction” issue.

Fiction editor Bill Buford remembers his introduction to Diaz. “A fellow editor stomped up and down in my office saying, ‘You have to read these, you have to read these, you have to read these,”‘ he says. “She was right.”

For Buford, it is “that elusive thing called voice” that makes Diaz stand out.

“Junot has this very unusual combination of street smarts and university educated literary-ness,” Buford says. “Like Salman Rushdie, he is able to address two cultures at once.

“It’s an exhilarating thing to come upon a new writer who is telling stories in a way that’s unlike the way anyone else has done them.”

The pressures of immigration

Born in Santo Domingo, the writer’s family followed his father to New Jersey when Diaz was 6. He spoke not a word of English, but learned soon enough.

“I learned at school, through a process that is euphemistically known as ‘total immersion,”‘ says Diaz. “We called it hell.”

Books were an escape. His “fierce” love of reading was further influenced by his father. “My old man was a tough guy with books,” says Diaz, “and I have no doubt that this was an overwhelming influence on me. I didn’t think that the two, being tough and reading, were contradictory.”

And tough was necessary for Diaz, who describes the process of immigration as “a pressure that passes down past the parents and into the children. The sacrifices of immigration really disfigured all of the families that I knew.”

These pressures and sacrifices figure prominently in his writing, which explores the intimate world of families and lovers in the Dominican Republic and urban America. His characters struggle with poverty, with absent fathers, with inner worlds and longings at odds with outer realities and expectations.

Infused with his own experiences, the stories are meticulously crafted, highly literary, lyrical works. They are also full of slang, sex and a wonderful sense of humor that belies their bleak narratives.

Diaz attributes this humor to his community. “The people I grew up with had tremendous hearts and humor,” he says.

When asked about his literary influences, he responds, “First and foremost, every neighbor, friend and family member I’ve ever had  that is the baseline of my storytelling and love of language.” (He also lists television, comic books and movies as major influences, before getting to the answer he “is supposed to give,” which includes writers like Sandra Cisneros, Toni Morrison and Piri Thomas.)

‘Characters as specimens’

Diaz grew up surrounded by “voracious users of language. Most Dominicans speak three or four different ones,” he says. “Part of my writing project is to figure out how to communicate that to a reader.” Another part of his project is to explore the complexities of the Dominican Diaspora.

“Most of the people I encounter have really comfortable myths about themselves  that Dominicans are a certain way, that our culture is a certain thing. I’ve always strongly disliked those myths,” he says.

His regard for his characters is palpable, both when speaking to him and when reading his work.

“It’s easy to write a piece where you see your characters as specimens,” says George Saunders, author of “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” and a professor of creative writing at Syracuse University. “Junot really loves his characters. To me, that’s the million dollar thing.”

Saunders was so impressed by “Drown” that he offered Diaz a teaching position several years ago, a one-year position that Syracuse made permanent. Saunders describes his colleague as “having a moral intelligence that you don’t see very often. He cares deeply about the world around him, and that translates into his writing.”

Fellow writer Edwidge Danticat agrees.

“His work is just so strong, so immediate. The characters create their own communities, which are marginal  except for the people who live in them,” says the Haitian-born writer, whose story, “Water Child,” appears in “The Beacon Best of 2001,” with Diaz as guest editor.

Danticat and Diaz became friends when introduced at one of his readings several years ago. Like Diaz, Danticat came from a poor background and immigrated to the United States at a young age. Many of the voices in Diaz’s work, she says, “echo for people who are often underrepresented in literature. You recognize these people, as friends, as neighbors. You feel like they’re with you when he’s reading.”

Gone but not forgotten

These days, Diaz lives far away from many of those voices. He splits his time between Syracuse, New York City and various writing festivals and is working on his next two novels.

Diaz does not react favorably to being congratulated for “making it.”

“I don’t see my African-ness, my Dominican-ness, my childhood poverty, as stumbling blocks,” he says. “I don’t think of them as things I had to overcome.”

Still, when discussing his family Diaz refers to himself as “the one who left and never really came back.” Educated at Rutgers University in New Jersey and then Cornell University in upstate New York, he has traveled a long distance from the young boy who was ashamed to speak because his pronunciation was so poor.

But if he has not gone back, he has also not forgotten. Community work, says Diaz, sometimes feels more integral to his identity than his fiction, which he writes first and foremost for the small group of people with whom he grew up.

“The community I came from did not sacrifice so much to put me through school, to make me a good, positive person, so that I could turn my back on it,” he says.

“I want to write to my community, not about it.”