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by Alejandro Zambra
A "brilliant, innovative, beautiful" (The Guardian) book from the acclaimed author of Chilean Poet.
"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, itconfirms Alejandro Zambra as one of the most important writers working in any language.
"Dazzling...a work of parody, but also of poetry." —The New York Times Book Review
"Amusing and unexpected ... In just a few pages [Zambra] manages to be repeatedly engaging, smart, funny, and sad." —Publishers Weekly
"Consistently witty and provocative ... True or false: can effective fiction be written in the format of a standardized test? Answer: pretty much, and few are as equipped to do it as well as Chilean writer Zambra." —Kirkus Reviews
"Zambra is the defining light of today's Latin American literature—an author whose cult is about to take over, the one we'll all be congratulating ourselves on having known about in the early days, before his deceptively slender masterpieces lay on every American reader's night table. Multiple Choice is the most daring distillation yet of his inimitable, take-no-prisoners genius." —John Wray, author of The Lost Time Accidents
"When I read Zambra I feel like someone's shooting fireworks inside my head. His prose is as compact as a grain of gunpowder, but its allusions and ramifications branch out and illuminate even the most remote corners of our minds." —Valeria Luiselli, author of The Story of My Teeth
This information about Multiple Choice was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Alejandro Zambra is the author of the story collection My Documents, which was a finalist for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, and three previous novels: Ways of Going Home, The Private Lives of Trees, and Bonsai. His books have been translated into more than ten languages. He has received numerous prizes in Chile, including the Chilean Literary Critics' Award in 2007 and the National Book Council's award for best novel in 2007 and 2012, as well as international distinctions such as the Prince Claus Award in Holland. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Harper's, Tin House, and McSweeney's, among others. In 2010, he was named one of Granta's Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists. A 2015–2016 Cullman Center fellow at the New York Public Library, he divides his time between New York and Santiago, Chile.
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Polite conversation is rarely either.
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