"Brilliant, innovative, beautiful." —The Guardian "Dazzling...a work of parody, but also of poetry." —The New York Times Book Review NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR, THE GUARDIAN, AND THE IRISH TIMES “Latin America’s new literary star” (The New Yorker), Alejandro Zambra is celebrated around the world for his strikingly original, slyly funny, daringly unconventional fiction. Now, at the height of his powers, Zambra returns with his most audaciously brilliant book yet. Written in the form of a standardized test, Multiple Choice invites the reader to respond to virtuoso language exercises and short narrative passages through multiple-choice questions that are thought-provoking, usually unanswerable, and often absurd. It offers a new kind of reading experience, one in which the reader participates directly in the creation of meaning, and the nature of storytelling itself is called into question. At once funny, poignant, and political, Multiple Choice is about love and family, authoritarianism and its legacies, and the conviction that, rather than learning to think for ourselves, we are trained to obey and repeat. Serious in its literary ambition and playful in its execution, itconfirms Alejandro Zambra as one of the most important writers working in any language. NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE SUMMER BY THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, ELLE,THE HUFFINGTON POST, THE MILLIONS, VOX, LIT HUB, THE BBC, THE GUARDIAN AND PUREWOW

Multiple Choice

Humor & Entertainment

Zambra, Alejandro

Humor

Penguin??Books

A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR 
A WALL STREET JOURNAL TOP 10 BOOK OF THE YEAR 
ONE OF NPR’S “BOOKS WE LOVE”\n“A tender and funny story about love, family and the peculiar position of being a stepparent…[Chilean Poet]broadens the author’s scope and quite likely his international reputation.” —Los Angeles Times\n“Zambra [is] one of the most brilliant Latin American writers of his generation.” —The New York Review of Books\n“Zambra's books have long shown him to be a writer who, at the sentence level, is in a world all his own.” —Juan Vidal, NPR.org\nA writer of “startling talent” (The New York Times Book Review), Alejandro Zambra returns with his most substantial work yet: a story of fathers and sons, ambition and failure, and what it means to make a family\nAfter a chance encounter at a Santiago nightclub, aspiring poet Gonzalo reunites with his first love, Carla. Though their desire for each other is still intact, much has changed: among other things, Carla now has a six-year-old son, Vicente. Soon the three form a happy sort-of family—a stepfamily, though no such word exists in their language.\nEventually, their ambitions pull the lovers in different directions—in Gonzalo’s case, all the way to New York. Though Gonzalo takes his books when he goes, still, Vicente inherits his ex-stepfather’s love of poetry. When, at eighteen, Vicente meets Pru, an American journalist literally and figuratively lost in Santiago, he encourages her to write about Chilean poets—not the famous, dead kind, your Nerudas or Mistrals or Bolaños, but rather the living, striving, everyday ones. Pru’s research leads her into this eccentric community—another kind of family, dysfunctional but ultimately loving. Will it also lead Vicente and Gonzalo back to each other?\nIn Chilean Poet, Alejandro Zambra chronicles with enormous tenderness and insight the small moments—sexy, absurd, painful, sweet, profound—that make up our personal histories. Exploring how we choose our families and how we betray them, and what it means to be a man in relationships—a partner, father, stepfather, teacher, lover, writer, and friend—it is a bold and brilliant new work by one of the most important writers of our time.

Chilean Poet: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

United States

“Sublime . . . true and beautiful and moving.” —The New York Times Book Review\nThe landmark first novel of one of the greatest living Latin American writers—now in a sparkling new translation by his longtime collaborator\nWhen it was first published in 2006, then-literary critic and poet Alejandro Zambra’s first novel, Bonsai, caused a sensation. “It was said,” according to Chile’s newspaper of record, El Mercurio, “that it represented the end of an era, or the beginning of another, in the nation’s letters.” Zambra would go on to become a writer of international renown, winning prizes in Chile and around the world for his funny, tender, sly fictions.\nHere, in a brilliant new translation from four-time International Booker Prize nominee Megan McDowell, is the little book that started it all: The story of Julio and Emilia, two Chilean university students who, seeking truth in great literature, find one another instead. As they fall together and drift apart over the course of young adulthood, Zambra spins an emotionally engrossing, expertly distilled, formally inventive tale of love, art, and memory.

Bonsai: A Novel

The second novel by the internationally celebrated writer Alejandro Zambra, a “short and strikingly original” (The New Yorker) book about the stories we spin for ourselves and our loved ones—now reissued by Penguin\nVeronica is late, and Julián is increasingly convinced she won't ever come home. To pass the time, he improvises a story about trees to coax his stepdaughter, Daniela, to sleep. He has made a life as a literature professor, developing a novel about a man tending to a bonsai tree on the weekends. He is a narrator, an architect, a chronicler of other people's stories. But as the night stretches on before him, and the hours pass with no sign of Veronica, Julián finds himself caught up in the slipstream of the story of his life—of their lives together. What combination of desire and coincidence led them here, to this very night? What will the future—and possibly motherless—Daniela think of him and his stories? Why tell stories at all?\nThe second novel by acclaimed Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra, The Private Lives of Trees overflows with his signature wit and his gift for crafting short novels that manage to contain whole worlds.

The Private Lives of Trees: A Novel

The landmark first story collection from internationally acclaimed author Alejandro Zambra, now featuring five additional stories and an introduction by his longtime collaborator, Megan McDowell An early desktop computer becomes the third partner in a doomed relationship; an older brother figure whose father lives in exile imparts hilarious life lessons to his young protégé. A man attempts to quit smoking despite the fact that he's very good at it; another masquerades as the family man he'll never be. Throughout, Pinochet's dictatorship casts a long shadow, and men in relationships exhibit their profound capacity for both love and harm. In these unforgettable stories--which span religion, romance, technology, soccer, solitude, and more--Alejandro Zambra unfolds a radical literary reflection on life, relationships, and the tender and brutal dimensions of masculinity in Chile from the 1980s to the present. Intimate and playful, provocative and profound,&nbsp;and brilliantly rendered by National Book Award winning translator Megan McDowell, My Documents a testament to the necessity of literature even--and especially--in times of political and personal crisis.

My Documents: Stories

Childish Literature

Humor & Satire

Alejandro Zambra's Ways of Going Home begins with an earthquake, seen through the eyes of an unnamed nine-year-old boy who lives in an undistinguished middleclass housing development in a suburb of Santiago, Chile. When the neighbors camp out overnight, the protagonist gets his first glimpse of Claudia, an older girl who asks him to spy on her uncle Raúl.
In the second section, the protagonist is the writer of the story begun in the first section. His father is a man of few words who claims to be apolitical but who quietly sympathized―to what degree, the author isn't sure―with the Pinochet regime. His reflections on the progress of the novel and on his own life―which is strikingly similar to the life of his novel's protagonist―expose the raw suture of fiction and reality.
 Ways of Going Home switches between author and character, past and present, reflecting with melancholy and rage on the history of a nation and on a generation born too late―the generation which, as the author-narrator puts it, learned to read and write while their parents became accomplices or victims. It is the most personal novel to date from Zambra, the most important Chilean author since Roberto Bolaño.

Ways of Going Home: A Novel

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

A brilliant novel from "the herald of a new wave of Chilean fiction" (Marcela Valdes, The Nation) Alejandro Zambra's Ways of Going Home begins with an earthquake, seen through the eyes of an unnamed nine-year-old boy who lives in an undistinguished middle-class housing development in a suburb of Santiago, Chile. When the neighbors camp out overnight, the protagonist gets his first glimpse of Claudia, an older girl who asks him to spy on her uncle Raúl. In the second section, the protagonist is the writer of the story begun in the first section. His father is a man of few words who claims to be apolitical but who quietly sympathized―to what degree, the author isn't sure―with the Pinochet regime. His reflections on the progress of the novel and on his own life―which is strikingly similar to the life of his novel's protagonist―expose the raw suture of fiction and reality. Ways of Going Home switches between author and character, past and present, reflecting with melancholy and rage on the history of a nation and on a generation born too late―the generation which, as the author-narrator puts it, learned to read and write while their parents became accomplices or victims. It is the most personal novel to date from Zambra, the most important Chilean author since Roberto Bolaño.

Product Description “A tender and funny story about love, family and the peculiar position of being a stepparent…[Chilean Poet]broadens the author’s scope and quite likely his international reputation.” —Los Angeles Times“Zambra's books have long shown him to be a writer who, at the sentence level, is in a world all his own.” —Juan Vidal, NPR.org A writer of “startling talent” (The New York Times Book Review), Alejandro Zambra returns with his most substantial work yet: a story of fathers and sons, ambition and failure, and what it means to make a familyAfter a chance encounter at a Santiago nightclub, aspiring poet Gonzalo reunites with his first love, Carla. Though their desire for each other is still intact, much has changed: among other things, Carla now has a six-year-old son, Vicente. Soon the three form a happy sort-of family—a stepfamily, though no such word exists in their language. Eventually, their ambitions pull the lovers in different directions—in Gonzalo’s case, all the way to New York. Though Gonzalo takes his books when he goes, still, Vicente inherits his ex-stepfather’s love of poetry. When, at eighteen, Vicente meets Pru, an American journalist literally and figuratively lost in Santiago, he encourages her to write about Chilean poets—not the famous, dead kind, your Nerudas or Mistrals or Bolaños, but rather the living, striving, everyday ones. Pru’s research leads her into this eccentric community—another kind of family, dysfunctional but ultimately loving. Will it also lead Vicente and Gonzalo back to each other? In Chilean Poet, Alejandro Zambra chronicles with enormous tenderness and insight the small moments—sexy, absurd, painful, sweet, profound—that make up our personal histories. Exploring how we choose our families and how we betray them, and what it means to be a man in relationships—a partner, father, stepfather, teacher, lover, writer, and friend—it is a bold and brilliant new work by one of the most important writers of our time. Review “Chilean Poet complicates the notion of an artistic birthright rooted in national identity . . . [it] treats the thorny topic of collective identity not as tragedy, but as a familial comedy. Its laughs are forged across languages . . . [such] that one happily loses track of any original.”—New York Times Book Review “[Zambra] mix[es] tenderness, depth and laugh-out-loud humor . . . [his] incursions into metafiction, in which the author peeks in and winks at the reader, feel playful, serendipitous. He’s clearly having fun.”—Los Angeles Times“[A] splendid book . . . Chilean Poet moves deftly among different points of view . . . [Vicente's] complicated reunion with Gonzalo is one of the best endings to a novel that I have read in years, a scene of beautiful emotional improvisation.”—Wall Street Journal“[A] charming novel.”—The New Yorker“A fascinating portrait of a country at a turning point . . . It is a testament to Zambra’s skill that I can so readily imagine the continuation of Vicente’s life. It is also a testament to Chilean Poet’s hopefulness, which, while cautious, runs so deep that the book seems almost to have predicted [Gabriel] Boric’s victory.”—The Atlantic “Zambra’s fifth novel is in many ways a return to youth, the beauty, the unreliability, and the red-hot indignity of it . . . there are those signature Zambra sentences, those reckless, rambling sentences that proceed like sleepwalkers traversing the same crosswalk, heedless of traffic lights . . . this is fiction that provokes a need in you, a curiosity you wish to prolong by returning to it someday: crushing or euphoric emotions (love, regret, giving up, artistic passion) paired with everyday events (using a computer, quitting smoking) and packed in a miniature, highly constrained form . . . in many strange and enthralling ways [it] mature[s] as one reads it.”—Bookforum“Hilarious, touching, and a phenomenal jumping off point for deepening your knowledge of Chilean poetry’s varied, me

VIKING

En Santiago de Chile, a principios de los años noventa del pasado siglo, dos quinceañeros, Gonzalo y Carla, tantean la vida y el deseo, y mantienen sus primeras relaciones sexuales, marcadas por la exploratoria torpeza. Él sueña con ser poeta y, cuando ella rompe la relación, le manda por correo una sucesión de breves poemas de amor en los que expresa su desesperación y empieza a buscar su voz literaria. La historia podría haberse quedado ahí, como una mera aventura adolescente de iniciación, pero, nueve años después, Gonzalo y Carla se cruzan en un bar gay y se produce un desatado reencuentro en los lavabos que acaba con la ropa interior de ambos desapareciendo por el inodoro. Retoman la relación y pronto Gonzalo descubrirá que ella ha tenido un hijo, Vicente, del que él se convertirá durante un tiempo en padrastro...

Chilean Poet

Poetry

Penguin LCC US

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Books by Zambra, Alejandro

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Zambra, Alejandro. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Multiple Choice

Chilean Poet: A Novel

Bonsai: A Novel

The Private Lives of Trees: A Novel

My Documents: Stories

Childish Literature

Ways of Going Home: A Novel

Ways of Going Home: A Novel

Chilean Poet: A Novel

Chilean Poet