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, 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.
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 Veronica 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? The 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.
Over the course of the chronicles and literary essays that make up this volume, Alejandro Zambra outlines his own particular theory of reading. Whether it is in the course of a carefully considered commentary on a specific book, or in the digressions born out of a piece on this or that author - from Parra, Levrero and Pavese to Millán, Ribeyro, Tanizaki or Bolaño, Natalia Ginzburg and Puig - the simple act of reading dominates these pages, within which the author alternates between forceful and good-humoured rants against clichés and impostures and intimist celebrations of true literary experiences. The book's title is an allusion to the moment when Zambra decided to stop writing a weekly literary column and began instead to experiment, as he explains, with the pleasure of not reading certain books, thus allowing himself the freedom to open himself up to readings not imperative to the daily routine of literary journalism. As in his novels and poems, in Not to Read Alejandro Zambra unfurls his characteristic style, which place ambiguity, restraint and uncertainty above everything else, and offer up the suggestion that certain books can touch us in substantial ways. In doing so the outlines of a kind of blurry self-portrait emerge - something like the image of an exemplary writer and reader reflected in a concave mirror, in his library, and surrounded by ghosts and feelings.
The writer son of a quiet sympathizer with the Pinochet regime reflects on the progress of his novel, in which an unnamed boy from a Chilean suburb witnesses an earthquake and meets an older girl who asks him to spy on her uncle.
Winner of Chile’s Literary Critics’ Award for Best Novel" 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.”
A "brilliant, innovative, beautiful" (The Guardian) book from the acclaimed author of Chilean Poet "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, it confirms 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
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” “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 family After 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.
From the author of My Documents and Chilean Poet, a wise, humorous, and captivating literary exploration of the delights and absurdities of childhood, fatherhood, and family life Childish Literature is a charming and wide-ranging collection of short stories, essays, and even a couple of poems produced under the influence of fatherhood, a transformative experience that reshapes and enlivens the author's relationship to aging, intimacy, and time. Written in Alejandro Zambra’s brilliantly warm, playful, and philosophical voice, these pieces explore the lives of families and their stories through a wide variety of topics—from screen time and "soccer sadness" to personal libraries, fishing, and psychedelics. Throughout, Zambra captures the texture of daily life and deep truths about how we feel and live, with particular insight into the ways parents and children challenge, enrich, and entertain each other. Simultaneously lighthearted and profound, and brilliantly rendered by National Book Award-winning translator Megan McDowell, Childish Literature is an intimate and unclassifiable new work by an internationally celebrated writer.
Genç Latin Amerika edebiyatının parlak bir örneği Yeni kuşak Şilili yazarlarının en önemlisi olarak görülen Alejandro Zambra’nın ilk romanı Bonzai yayımlandığı 2006 yılından bu yana birçok dile çevrildi ve birçok ödül kazandı. Bonzai, Julio ve Emilia’nın hikâyesiyle yoğrulan ufacık ve zarif bir roman, tıpkı bonzailer gibi. Julio ve Emilia’nın birlikteliği yalnızca cinsel ya da duygusal değil, aynı zamanda edebi. Her gece sevişmeden önce birbirlerine şiirler, romanlar, öyküler okuyorlar. Falubert’in Madame Bovary’sinden Yukio Mişima’nın Altın Tapınak’ına, Perec’in Uyuyan Adam’ından Raymond Carver’ın öykülerine… Bonzai’deki yazar adayı anlatıcı, “Bu, gerçeğe, gerçek gibi görünen cümleleri etrafa saçmaya, bitmek bilmeyen sigaralar içmeye ve daha iyi olduklarına, geriye kalanlardan, o uçsuz bucaksız ve aşağılık geriye kalanlar denen gruptan daha iyi ve saf olduklarına inananların vahşi suç ortaklığında hapsolmaya tutkun iki öğrencinin hikâyesi,” diyor Julio ve Emilia’nın gittikçe ağırlaşan hafif hikâyesi için. Sonunda Emilia ölüyor, Julio ise ölmüyor. Gerisi edebiyat. İspanyolcadan çeviren Çiğdem Öztürk Notos Edebiyat-Roman #NotosKitap #NotosEdebiyatDizisi
Julio liebt Emilia, Emilia liebt Julio, beide lieben Proust – beide haben in Wirklichkeit nicht eine Seite Proust gelesen –, ein Jahr lang sind sie während ihres Studiums liiert, dann verlässt sie ihn, und er liebt sie weiter, sie geht nach Europa, und er liebt sie weiter, die Zeit vergeht, und er liebt sie weiter, sie stirbt, und er liebt sie weiter, Jahre später erinnert er sich, und er liebt sie immer weiter. Bonsai ist die blendend schöne Miniatur einer epischen Liebesgeschichte: ein kunstvoll geraffter Roman über die erotisierende Wirkung von Lektüren, missverstandene körperliche Zuneigung und die nicht enden wollende Sehnsucht nach dem anderen.
Worried that his wife Veronica will not return home from an art class, Julian imagines his stepdaughter Daniela's future without her mother and tells her an improvisional bedtime story.
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.
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, 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.
From the author of My Documents and Chilean Poet, a wise, humorous, and captivating literary exploration of the delights and absurdities of childhood, fatherhood, and family life Childish Literature is a charming and wide-ranging collection of short stories, essays, and even a couple of poems produced under the influence of fatherhood, a transformative experience that reshapes and enlivens the author's relationship to aging, intimacy, and time. Written in Alejandro Zambra’s brilliantly warm, playful, and philosophical voice, these pieces explore the lives of families and their stories through a wide variety of topics—from screen time and "soccer sadness" to personal libraries, fishing, and psychedelics. Throughout, Zambra captures the texture of daily life and deep truths about how we feel and live, with particular insight into the ways parents and children challenge, enrich, and entertain each other. Simultaneously lighthearted and profound, and brilliantly rendered by National Book Award-winning translator Megan McDowell, Childish Literature is an intimate and unclassifiable new work by an internationally celebrated writer.
“Taut and full of verve.” —The New York Times Book Review The landmark first novel of one of the greatest living Latin American writers—now in a sparkling new translation by his longtime collaborator When 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. Here, 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.
From Alejandro Jodorowsky—legendary director of The Holy Mountain, spiritual guru behind Psychomagic and The Way of Tarot, and author of Where the Bird Sings Best—comes another autobiographical tour-de-force: a mythopoetic portrait of the artist as a young man in the sociopolitical maelstrom of 1930s Chile. In Where the Bird Sings Best —Alejandro Jodorowsky’s visionary autobiographical novel that NPR compared to One Hundred Years of Solitude and called “a genius’s surreal vision brought to life”—we followed Jodorowsky’s predecessors as they came to Chile, fleeing pogroms in Ukraine. Now, in The Son of Black Thursday, Jodorowsky himself takes the stage alongside the unforgettable cast of his early years as they confront the horrors of indentured servitude in American-backed copper mines and the brutal oppression of a corrupt government. Alongside the young dreamer Alejandro, we follow his father, Jaime, who’s obsessed with assassinating the dictator whom he ends up serving; his mother, Sara Felicidad, a spiritually attuned giantess who moonlights as a shopkeeper-turned-revolutionary and sings instead of speaks; Rubi, the mystic heiress to the copper mines who conceives a magnificent sacrifice to foment a workers’ revolt; and the ghost of a wise rabbi who’s been passed down as mentor from one Jodorowsky generation to the next. In its captivating blend of wonder, horror, humor, eros, and magic, The Son of Black Thursday is another mind-expanding opus from Jodorowsky that feels both cosmically true and and urgently needed for our time. Praise for Where the Bird Sings Best “Where the Bird Sings Best is Alejandro Jodorowsky’s brilliant, mad, and unpredictable semi-autobiographical novel. Translated by Alfred MacAdam, this multigenerational chronicle introduces a host of memorable characters, from a dwarf prostitute and a floating ghost-Rabbi to a lion tamer who eats raw meat and teaches his beasts to jump through flaming hoops. Fantastical elements aside, Where the Bird Sings Best is a fiercely original immigration tale that culminates in the author’s birth in Chile in 1929—a complicated time in that nation’s history. Combine that with poetry, tarot, and Jewish mysticism and you have a genius’s surreal vision brought to life.” —NPR, Best Books of 2015 “Wildly inventive.… Jodorowsky’s masterpiece swirls around the reader, lurching from violent episode to mystical encounter to cosmic sexual escapade as we follow our narrator’s grandparents’ journey from the old world to, refreshingly, South America. As the drama unfolds, the reader’s response veers from incredulity to awe, from doubt to delight. The momentum holds for the length of the novel as a cavalcade of outsized characters careen across the page in a frenzy that seems for once an adequate and just representation of the living fury that is history.… The images possess an extreme yet striking beauty.” —Askold Melnyczuk, The Los Angeles Review of Books “This epic family saga, reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude in structure and breadth, reads at a breakneck pace. Though ostensibly a novelization of the author’s own family history, it is a raucous carnival of the surreal, mystical, and grotesque.... It weaves together Jewish philosophy, passion, humor, Tarot, ballet, circuses, natural disasters, spectacular suicides, lion tamers, knife throwers, Catholic devotion, farmers, betrayals, prostitutes, leftist politics, political violence, and the ghost of a wise rabbi who follows the family from the Old World to the New.” —Publishers Weekly “A sweeping tale of personal, philosophical, and political struggles. It’s an immigrant’s story of Fellini-esque proportions…. For the self-proclaimed atheist mystic, the sacraments are memory, dreams, family, wisdom, the grotesque, and the reinvention of the self…. A conduit and biographical key that further reveals his mesmerizing process of imaginative self-fashioning.” —Alison Nastasi, Flavorwire “The legendary filmmaker has taken his lineage for inspiration in this twisted meditation on existentialism flavored with Jewish mysticism, incest, and some honey for good measure. This supposed biography works more as a jumping off place for a truly wild literary ride. Graphic, ambitious, magical, demented—Jodorowsky’s visual virtuosity showcases a whirlwind of occultism, cultism, sex, and death across time and space. Truly striking, psychedelic, and one of the more surreal books I have read in a while. But what more could you expect from the man who adapted Frank Herbert’s Dune into a 14-hour film and created his own tarot?” —Ashanti White-Wallace, WORD Bookstore (Jersey City, NJ)
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” “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 [is] one of the most brilliant Latin American writers of his generation.” —The New York Review of Books “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 family After 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.
A "brilliant, innovative, beautiful" (The Guardian) book from the acclaimed author of Chilean Poet "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, it confirms 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
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