Multiple Choice by Alejandro Zambra

ACCLAIM FOR ALEJANDRO ZAMBRA
    My Documents
    Named one of the Best Books of 2015 by
The Boston Globe
    A
New York Times
Editors’ Choice
    Finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award
    â€œAll of [Zambra’s books] are very short and strikingly original. . . . In his new book, Zambra returns to the twin sources of his talent—to his storytelling vitality, that living tree which blossoms often in these pages, and to his unsparing examination of recent Chilean history.”
    â€”James Wood,
The New Yorker
    â€œZambra’s books have long shown him to be a writer who, at the sentence level, is in a world all his own. . . . Let us now forget the smallness of simply spearheading a new Latin American fiction.
My Documents
goes beyond that, brighter than most anything we’d call exceptional, yesterday or today and in any language.”
    â€”NPR
    â€œThis dynamite collection of stories has it all—Chile and Belgium, exile and homecomings, Pinochet and Simon and Garfunkel—but what I love most about the tales is their strangeness, their intelligence, and their splendid honesty.”
    â€”Junot Díaz, NewYorker.com
    â€œZambra knows how to turn the familiar inside out, but he also knows how to wrap us up in it. His generous stories satisfy our demand for narrative even as they question it.”
    â€”Natasha Wimmer,
The New York Times Book Review
    â€œ[A] dazzlingly funny and playful collection.”
    â€”John Freeman,
The Boston Globe
    â€œSentence-by-sentence pleasure . . . [Zambra’s] most substantial achieve-ment yet.”
    â€”
The Seattle Times
    â€œMuch like Junot Díaz’s
Drown
, the stories in Chilean author Zambra’s collection are discrete tales that blend together with an impressive fluidity. . . . Through eleven stories, the author’s charming cast examines religion, soccer, relationships, and the lure of solitude—all from a distinctly Chilean perspective. But the view is also a youthful one, neatly capturing the puzzling process of trying to figure out who you really are. A–”
    â€”
Entertainment Weekly
    â€œCompulsive . . . rich and thought-provoking . . . If you are going to read Zambra, which you should, don’t just read
My Documents
: read everything he’s done.”
    â€”
The Guardian
(London)
    â€œZambra’s sentences comically dance around narrative convention without disrupting the immersive pull of the story. I can think of no one else who does this, and the effect is spellbinding. . . . His fiction is, quite simply, some of the best being produced today.”
    â€”Matt Kessler, The Rumpus
    â€œZambra is so alert to the intimate beauty and mystery of being alive that in his hands a raindrop would feel as wide as a world.”
    â€”Anthony Marra, author of
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
    â€œ
My Documents
is an act of literary levitation—luminous, magical, and profound, written with the mysterious quality of weightlessness.”
    â€”Jess Walter, author of
Beautiful Ruins
    â€œZambra is one of my favorite living writers. He brings such clarity, exactitude, compassion, oddity, and inventiveness to his books that every new volume he publishes goes on my read-this-immediately list.”
    â€”Kevin Brockmeier, author of
The Brief History of the Dead
    Ways of Going Home
    â€œ[Alejandro Zambra’s novels] are written with startling talent. And Zambra’s latest novel represents, I think, his deepest achievement. . . . The best conjuring trick is the one where you’re shown how it’s done, which in no way contradicts your belief that what you’ve seen is magic.”
    â€”Adam Thirlwell,
The New York Times Book Review
    â€œIn many ways, [this] book recalls the miniature roominess Philip Roth achieved in his great novel,
The Ghost Writer
. The stories we tell imagine us as