"During the course of a single night, Father Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix, a Chilean priest who is a member of Opus Dei, a literary critic and a mediocre poet, relives some of the crucial events of his life. He believes he is dying, and in his feverish delirium various characters, both real and imaginary, appear to him as icy monsters, as if in sequences from a horror film. Among them are the great poet Pablo Neruda, the German novelist Ernst Junger, and General Augusto Pinochet - whom Father Lacroix instructs in Marxist doctrine - as well as various members of the Chilean intelligentsia whose lives, during a period of political turbulence, have touched his own."--Jacket.

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.

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

The Savage Detectives elicits mixed feelings. An instant classic in the Spanish-speaking world upon its 1998 publication, a critical and commercial smash on its 2007 translation into English, Roberto Bolaño’s novel has also been called an exercise in 1970s nostalgia, an escapist fantasy of a romanticized Latin America, and a publicity event propped up by the myth of the bad-boy artist. David Kurnick argues that the controversies surrounding Bolaño’s life and work have obscured his achievements—and that The Savage Detectives is still underappreciated for the subtlety and vitality of its portrait of collective life. Kurnick explores The Savage Detectives as an epic of social structure and its decomposition, a novel that restlessly moves between the big configurations—of states, continents, and generations—and the everyday stuff—parties, jobs, moods, sex, conversation—of which they’re made. For Kurnick, Bolaño’s book is a necromantic invocation of life in history, one that demands surrender as much as analysis. Kurnick alternates literary-critical arguments with explorations of the novel’s microclimates and neighborhoods—the little atmospheric zones where some of Bolaño’s most interesting rethinking of sexuality, politics, and literature takes place. He also claims that The Savage Detectives holds particular interest for U.S. readers: not because it panders to them but because it heralds the exhilarating prospect of a world in which American culture has lost its presumptive centrality.

Longlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize Felipe and Iquela, two young friends in modern day Santiago, live in the legacy of Chile’s dictatorship. Felipe prowls the streets counting dead bodies real and imagined, aspiring to a perfect number that might offer closure. Iquela and Paloma, an old acquaintance from Iquela’s childhood, search for a way to reconcile their fragile lives with their parents’ violent militant past. The body of Paloma’s mother gets lost in transit, sending the three on a pisco-fueled journey up the cordillera as they confront the pain that stretches across generations.

This study is the only book in English to analyse Chilean memory culture using an interdisciplinary angle (memory studies, gender studies, literature in post-dictatorship Chile) It includes comprehensive material, from award-winning authors (Diamela Eltit, Carlos Franz, Arturo Fontaine), rising stars of the Chilean literary scene (Nona Fernández) to first-time published novelists (Pía González, Fátima Sime) It is the only book in English that focuses on women, memory and dictatorship in contemporary Chile from a cultural and literary perspective. It offers a new way of comprehending Chilean memory culture, considering gender and literature as two key elements in this cultural approach to the recent past.