Oscar is an overweight Dominican nerd in New Jersey who wants to be the next Tolkien. Diaz's 2007 novel uses Oscar's obsession with genre fiction as the lens for a multigenerational family history under the Trujillo dictatorship. The Spanglish prose, the footnotes on Dominican history, and the sci-fi/fantasy references create a voice that did not exist in American literature before this book. Won the Pulitzer.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.