Reader, your life is full of choices. Some will bring you joy and others will bring you heartache. Will you choose to cheat (in life, the examination that follows) or will you choose to copy? Will you fall in love? If so, will you remember her name and the number of freckles on her back? Will you marry, divorce, annul? Will you leave your run-down neighbourhood, your long-suffering country and your family? Will you honour your dead, those you loved and those you didn't? Will you have a child, will you regret it? Will you tell them you regret it? Will you, when all's said and done, deserve a kick in the balls? Will you find, here, in this slender book, fictions that entertain and puzzle you? Fictions that reflect yourself back to you? Will you find yourself? Relax, concentrate, dispel any anxious thoughts. Let the world around you settle and fade. Are you ready? Now turn over your papers, and begin.

Multiple Choice

Literature & Fiction

Alejandro Zambra

Contemporary

Granta Books

Chilean Poet

The Private Lives of Trees

Fitzcarraldo Editions

Childish Literature

Ways of Going Home

Growing up in 1980s Chile, a young boy plays hide and seek in the suburbs of Santiago with his friends while the adults become slowly entangled in the brutality of Pinochet's regime - accomplices and victims of the brutal dictatorship. As the country shudders under authoritarian rule, the boy creates stories of his own to explain the sporadic scenes of violence, the disappearances, and the deafening silence of his mother and father. Until, on the night of the Santiago earthquake, a mysterious girl named Claudia appears among the children and the boy's world is changed forever. Now, as a young man reflecting on the tragedies of his childhood, he must find the courage to confront as an adult what he could not have known as a child, and to untangle Chile's troubled past. As he struggles to begin a novel which will encompass the clash between innocence and complicity, the boundaries between fiction and reality blur and the beautiful Claudia comes back into his life.

Literary

Granta

Bonsai

Product Description Bonsai is the story of Julio and Emilia, two young Chilean students who, seeking truth in great literature, find each other instead. Like all young couples, they lie to each other, revise themselves, and try new identities on for size, observing and analyzing their love story as if it's one of the great novels they both pretend to have read. As they shadow each other throughout their young adulthoods, falling together and drifting apart, Zambra spins a formally innovative, metafictional tale that brilliantly explores the relationship among love, art, and memory. Review 'Not a single word is wasted in this powerful, elegantly told story, which traces through a few episodes in the lives of Julio and Emilia, two young people who fall for one another at university--bonding over their love of literature and discussion--then retreat from one another's lives.' -- Literary Hub'Bonsai fulfills one of the requirements of the short novel: the search for perfection [...] supremely, effectively ambiguous.' -- J.A. Masoliver Ródenas, La Vanguardia'Rather than shrink in its conversion to bound covers, as most manuscripts do, Zambra's text has swelled-and its effect on the world of Chilean literature has been entirely disproportionate to its size.' -- Marcela Valdes, The Nation'Every beat and pattern of being alive becomes revelatory and bright when narrated by Alejandro Zambra. He is a modern wonder.' -- Rivka Galchen, author of Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch'Strikingly original.' -- James Wood, New Yorker'The "last truly great book" I read has to be Alejandro Zambra's Bonsai. A subtle, eerie, ultimately wrenching account of failed young love in Chile among the kind of smartypant set who pillow-talk about the importance of Proust.... A total knockout.' -- Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao'When I read Zambra I feel like someone's shooting fireworks inside my head.' -- Valeria Luiselli, author of Lost Children Archive'The most talked-about writer to come out of Chile since Bolaño.' -- New York Times About the Author Alejandro Zambra is the author of the novels Chilean Poet, Multiple Choice, Ways of Going Home, The Private Lives of Trees, and Bonsai; the short story collection, My Documents, a finalist for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award; and Not to Read, a collection of essays. The recipient of numerous literary prizes, as well as a Cullman Center fellowship, his stories have appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, The White Review and Harper's, among others. He lives in Mexico City. Megan McDowell is an award-winning Spanish-language translator. She has translated books by Alejandro Zambra, Samanta Schweblin, Mariana Enríquez and Lina Meruane, among others, and her short story translations have appeared in the New Yorker, theParis Review, Harper'sandThe White Review. She lives in Santiago, Chile.

Winner of Chile's Literary Critics' Award for Best Novel
"One of the greatest literary events of recent years."-Alfonso Cortínez, Las Últimas Noticias
"An unclassifiable object of unusual beauty . . . one of the best Chilean novels of recent times."-David Lacalle, Capital
Hailed as a great Latin American literary event, this stylistically innovative, elliptically told tale of a young man and his love who mysteriously disappears is, as the narrator tells us, "a simple story that becomes complicated."
Through both the distance and closeness of these young lovers, Alejandro Zambra brilliantly explores the relationship between art, love, and life. Bonsai is accessible yet profound-as one critic in Chile's Capital newspaper put it, "Brief as a sigh and forceful as a blow."
Alejandro Zambra is acclaimed as the greatest writer of Chile's younger generation. He is a poet and critic and currently teaches literature at the Diego Portales University in Santiago. Bonsai is his first novel. It was awarded Chile's Literary Critics' Award for Best Novel.

Bonsai (The Contemporary Art of the Novella)

Melville House

Bonzai

Notos Kitap

Mudanza (Spanish Edition)

Antílope

Naar de stad

Carlos Fuentes

OLGA TOKARCZUK

CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE

Etgar Keret

Ali Smith

David Constantine

Wells Tower

Gyrðir Elíasson

Fouad Laroui

Mehmet Zaman Saçlıoğlu

Khan Mohammad Sind

Arkadi Babtsjenko

De Geus

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Books by Alejandro Zambra