Multiple Choice

“Multiple Choice is unlike anything I've ever encountered before. . . . Reading this book is a wonderfully disconcerting and unforgettable experience.” —Francisco Goldman, author ofSay 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 Alarcon, author ofAt 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 Bolano” (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.

Alejandro Zambra is the author of 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 and have received several international prizes. His stories have appeared in theNew Yorker, the Paris Review, Harper’s, Tin House, andMcSweeney’s, among others. In 2010, he was named one of Granta’s Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists, and he is a 2015–16 Cullman Center fellow at the New York Public Library. He teaches literature at Diego Portales University, in Santiago, Chile.

Megan McDowell (translator) is a Spanish language literary translator from Richmond, Kentucky. With the exception ofBonsai, she has translated all of Zambra’s books. She lives in Santiago, Chile.