Once outside its flowerpot, the tree ceases to be a bonsai. "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.” The Contemporary Art of the Novella series is designed to highlight work by major authors from around the world. In most instances, as with Imre Kertész, it showcases work never before published; in others, books are reprised that should never have gone out of print. It is intended that the series feature many well-known authors and some exciting new discoveries. And as with the original series, The Art of the Novella, each book is a beautifully packaged and inexpensive volume meant to celebrate the form and its practitioners

“Multiple Choice is unlike anything I’ve ever encountered before. Reading this book is a wonderfully disconcerting and unforgettable experience.” —Francisco Goldman, author of Say Her Name “There is no writer like Alejandro Zambra, no one as bold, as subtle, as funny. Multiple Choice is his most accomplished work yet. This book is not to be missed.” —Daniel Alarcón, author of At Night We Walk In Circles A masterful, pioneering new work of fiction by “Latin America’s new literary star” (The New Yorker) The works of Alejandro Zambra, “the most talked-about writer to come out of Chile since Bolaño” (New York Times Book Review), are distinguished by their striking originality, their brevity, their strangeness, and their flouting of narrative convention. Now, at the height of his powers, Zambra returns with a book that is the natural extension of these qualities: Multiple Choice. Written in the form of a standardized test, Multiple Choice invites the reader to complete virtuoso language exercises and engage with short narrative passages via multiple-choice questions that are thought-provoking, usually unanswerable, and often absurd. It offers a new kind of reading experience, one where the reader participates directly in the creation of meaning. Full of humor, melancholy, and anger, Multiple Choice is about love and family; privacy and the limits of closeness; how a society is affected by the legacies of the past; and the conviction that, rather than learning to think, we are trained to obey and repeat. Serious in its literary ambition but playful in its execution, Multiple Choice confirms Alejandro Zambra as one of the most important writers working in any language

Archived in a folder on award-winning author Alejandro Zambra's desktop are 11 stories of liars and ghosts, armed bandits and young lovers. Intimate, mysterious, and uncanny, these stories reveal a mind that is as undeniably singular as it is universal. Together, they constitute the debut short-story collection from Zambra, whose first novel was heralded as a “bloodletting in Chilean literature.” Whether chronicling the return of a mercurial godson or the disappearance of a trusted cousin, the worlds of these stories are so powerful and deep that the works might better be described as brief novels. My Documents is by turns hilarious and heart-stopping, tragic and tender, but most of all, it is unflinchingly human and essential evidence of a sublimely talented writer working at the height of his powers

A brilliant novel from Alejandro Zambra, “the herald of a new wave of Chilean fiction” (Marcela Valdes, The Nation). Ways of Going Home begins with an earthquake, seen through the eyes of an unnamed nine-year-old boy. He lives in an undistinguished middle-class housing development in Maipu, a town in the suburbs 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 Raul. In the second section, the protagonist is the writer of the novel 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 who, 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 Alejandro Zambra, the most important Chilean author since Roberto Bolaño