Alejandro Zambra is a Chilean writer whose works are characterized by a playful and innovative approach to literature. His writing often explores the nature of memory, identity, and the very act of storytelling. Zambra masterfully employs language and structure, creating unique and thought-provoking reading experiences that reflect the complexities of modern life.
Originally published in Spanish, this work delves into personal reflections and cultural observations, blending memoir and essay. The author explores themes of identity, memory, and the intricacies of language, offering readers a profound insight into their experiences and the world around them. The narrative is both introspective and engaging, inviting readers to contemplate their own lives alongside the author's journey.
Exploring the transformative nature of fatherhood, this collection features short stories, essays, and poems that delve into themes of aging, intimacy, and time. Alejandro Zambra's warm and playful voice captures the essence of family life, addressing topics such as screen time, "soccer sadness," and the dynamics between parents and children. The work combines lightheartedness with profound insights, offering a rich tapestry of daily experiences and emotions, all beautifully translated by Megan McDowell.
A tender, acute, hilarious saga about fathers, sons and the many forms of family, from a writer internationally heralded as a voice of his generation.
Available for the first time in the UK in a beautifully rendered new translation, Alejandro Zambra's brilliantly distilled first novel, a formally innovative, metafictional tale of love, art and memory.
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.
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.
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. MY DOCUMENTS is unflinchingly human and essential evidence of a sublimely talented writer working at the height of his powers. číst celé
A rising star of Latin American literature, and one of Granta's Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists
The second novel by the internationally celebrated writer Alejandro Zambra, a 'short and strikingly original' (New Yorker) book about the stories we spin for ourselves and our loved ones - now published in the UK for the first time by Fitzcarraldo Editions.
