Junot Diaz, who won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” will read from his work Nov. 20 in Ketchum, in the second event of the Sun Valley Center for the Arts’ 2009-10 Lecture Series.

Critics praised Diaz’s novel, calling it “astoundingly great” (Time magazine), “funny, street-smart and keenly observed” (New York Times) and “weirdly wonderful” (Washington Post), the center said.

Drawing on the author’s experience as an immigrant living in two cultures — he was born in the Dominican Republic but grew up in New Jersey — “Brief Wondrous Life” is the story of an overweight “ghetto nerd at the end of the world” who struggles under a family curse. It’s narrated in high-energy Spanglish and packed with cultural references.

“He doesn’t write like anyone I have ever read or anyone who has ever lectured for us before,” the center’s Britt Udesen said in a press release. “He is brutally honest, sometimes shocking, often funny.”

Diaz is also the author of a collection of short stories, “Drown,” published in 1996.

His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, African Voices, Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize XXII and The O’Henry Prize Stories 2009. He has received a Eugene McDermott Award, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, a Lila Acheson Wallace Readers Digest Award, the 2002 Pen/Malamud Award, the 2003 US-Japan Creative Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is fiction editor at the Boston Review and professor of creative writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Diaz’s reading will be at 7 p.m. Nov. 20 at the Presbyterian Church of the Big Wood in Ketchum. Tickets are $20 for Sun Valley Center for the Arts members and $30 for others, at www.sunvalleycenter.org or 726-9491, ext. 10.

Remaining lectures in the 2009-10 series:

•Journalist Roxana Saberi, 7 p.m. Jan. 7, Ketchum.

•Author Salman Rush-die, 7 p.m. Feb. 11, Sun Valley.

•Former Health & Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, 7 p.m. March 22, Ketchum.