Search results for ""Author Alejandro Zambra""

How do we write about the singular experience of parenthood? Written in a state of attachment', or under the influence' of fatherhood,Childish Literatureis an eclectic guide for novice parents, showing how the birth and growth of a child changes not only the present and the future, but also reshapes our perceptions of the past. Shifting from moving dispatches from his son's first year of existence, to a treatise on football sadness', to a psychedelic narrative where a man tries, mid-magic mushroom trip, to re-learn the subtle art of crawling, this latest work from Alejandro Zambra shows how children shield adults from despondency, self-absorption and the tyrannies of chronological time. At once a chronicle of fatherhood, a letter to a child and a work of fiction,Childish Literatureis the latest, virtuosic addition to the oeuvre of one of the most exciting Latin American writers in recent decades.

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A young boy plays hide and seek in the suburbs of Santiago, unaware that his neighbours are becoming entangled in the brutality of Pinochet's regime. Then one night a mysterious girl appears in his neighbourhood and makes a life-changing request.

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In Not to Read, Alejandro Zambra outlines his own particular theory of reading that also offers a kind of blurry self-portrait, or literary autobiography. Whether writing about Natalia Ginzburg, typewriters and computers, Paul Léautaud, or how to be silent in German, his essays function as a laboratory for his novels, a testing ground for ideas, readings and style. Not to Read also presents an alternative pantheon of Latin American literature – Zambra would rather talk about Nicanor Parra than Pablo Neruda, Mario Levrero than Gabriel García Márquez. His voice is that of a trusted friend telling you about a book or an author he’s excited about, how he reads, and why he writes. A standard-bearer of his generation in Chile, with Not to Read Alejandro Zambra confirms he is one of the most engaging writers of our time.

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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.

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My Documents is the latest work from Alejandro Zambra, the award-winning Chilean writer whose first novel was heralded as the dawn of a new era in Chilean literature. Whether chronicling the attempts of a migraine-afflicted writer to quit smoking or the loneliness of the call-centre worker, the life of a personal computer or the return of a mercurial godson, this collection of stories evokes the disenchantments of youth and the disillusions of maturity in a Chilean society still troubled by its recent past. Written with the author's trademark irony and precision, humour and melancholy, My Documents is unflinchingly human and essential evidence of a sublimely talented writer working at the height of his powers.

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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.

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Gonzalo is a frustrated would-be poet in a city full of poets; poets lurk in every bookshop, prop up every bar, ready to debate the merits of Teillier and Millan (but never Neruda - beyond the pale). Then, nine years after their bewildering breakup, Gonzalo reunites with his teen sweetheart, Carla, who is now, to his surprise, the mother of a young son, Vicente. Soon they form a happy sort-of family - a stepfamily, though no such word exists in their language. In time, fate and ambition pull the lovers apart, but when it comes to love and poetry, what will be Gonzalo's legacy to his not-quite-stepson Vicente? Zambra chronicles with tenderness and insight the everyday moments - absurd, painful, sexy, sweet, profound - that constitute family life in this bold and brilliant new novel.

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In the city of San Agustín de Tango, the banal is hard to tell from the bizarre. In a single day, a man is guillotined for preaching the intellectual pleasures of sex; an ostrich in a zoo, reversing roles, devours a lion; and a man, while urinating, goes bungee jumping through time itself—and manages to escape. Or does he? Witness the weird machinery of Yesterday, where the Chilean master Juan Emar deploys irony, digression, and giddy repetitions to ratchet up narrative tension again and again and again, in this thrilling whirlwind of the ecstatically unexpected—all wed to the happiest marriage of any novel, ever. Born in Chile at the tail end of the nineteenth century, Juan Emar was largely overlooked during his lifetime, and lived in self-imposed exile from the literary circles of his day. A cult of Emarians, however, always persisted, and after several rediscoveries in the Spanish-speaking world, he is finally getting his international due with the English-language debut of Yesterday, deftly translated by Megan McDowell. Emar’s work offers unique and delirious pleasures, and will be an epiphany to anglophone readers.

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