Alejandro Zambra / "Thank You"

All artwork by Tara Mizner.

"Thank You" 

A Short Story by Alejandro Zambra

Translated by Megan Mcdowell

Alejandro Zambra is one of our favorite living writers. His first book, "Bonsai", won the Chilean Critics' Award for Best Novel of the Year in 2006. We first read his work when Farrar, Straus and Giroux published "Ways of Going Home" in 2013.

Alejandro Zambra

Nov 22 2013, 7:00am

Alejandro Zambra is one of our favorite living writers. His first book, Bonsai, won the Chilean Critics' Award for Best Novel of the Year in 2006. We first read his work when Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Ways of Going Home in 2013. What distinguishes Alejandro from his contemporaries is the sweetness and intimacy of his writing, and his confidence in letting himself be as he is. As you read his work, there's never the impression that he is second-guessing himself, thinking, "So-and-so would do it this way," or "Such-and-such editor would say that." He exhibits this remarkable confidence on the page, one that allows him to be himself and to speak, a special kind of generosity. It feels like knowing and speaking to a sweetheart—it never feels like he's an author who pretends, or tries to teach, or falls into egotistical traps. Flaws in writing often come from flaws in character. Alejandro doesn't seem to have any of those. He's just a lovely, special, strange person who seems to look at his actual world and describe it in his actual, natural voice, and he leaves it at that. He has the authority that J. M. Coetzee, V. S. Naipaul, and Bret Easton Ellis have all identified as the writer's bedrock.

Top 10 contemporary short stories

Ahead of 2017’s National short story prize, Jon McGregor reluctantly chooses ‘swoony’ work from recent years showing some of the ways to write them well


Jon McGregor
Wednesday 13 September 2017 12.57 BST

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his summer, I read the entries for this year’s BBC National short story prize, and discussed with my fellow judges the vexed question of how the “best” might be identified.

This was both a pleasure and a serious challenge: the form of the story is so capacious and diverse that at times we were comparing apples and pears, or at least looking at an unfamiliar fruit and arguing over whether to call it an apple or a pear. (Rest assured, though: the challenge is not impossible. An apple is always better than a pear.) You can assess our choices after the shortlist is announced this Friday evening on BBC Radio 4. All five finalists will then be broadcast on successive afternoons on BBC Radio 4 (and made available on iPlayer) starting on 18 September.

But this challenge has been nothing against the request to choose stories to fit the title for this piece. Guardian, please! There are approximately 17m to choose from. Where do I even begin? Where are all the stories I haven’t read, or have loved and then unfaithfully forgotten? (I am a fickle and forgetful reader.)

This list, then, is not hierarchical or canonical. My choices are, simply, 10 tales from this century that I have read and that I think do something interesting or startling or just downright swoony with the form of the short story. Clicking on the titles will lead you to the stories themselves, if you haven’t already read them. I look forward to having my reading horizons broadened in the comments.

George Saunders

1. Victory Lap by George Saunders

Sorry to be so predictable, but I do love George Saunders. With this story, and the rest of the collection it comes from, Tenth of December, he was clearly taking his gifts for voice, character, and satire, and pushing himself to do something much harder and more humane. This story starts awkwardly, in tune with its two gangly teenage protagonists, and stutters through a lovely character study to suddenly burst into an action tale and an unlikely outbreak of heroism. It also offers a dazzling response to the writer’s dilemma of whether to move to a happy ending or a sad ending. On the last page, you can see Saunders looking at the options he has created for himself and simply opening his hands a little wider and saying, ‘Yes, we’ll have both of those.’

2. Pee on Water by Rachel B Glaser

This was my personal standout in the already very strong New American Stories, edited by Ben Marcus. I’m increasingly drawn to any story that has a more expansive sense of a story’s possibility than the “snapshot of life” model insisted upon by the Carver/Hemingway school. This story begins at the dawn of time and ends round about now, which is expansive enough for anyone, I feel. It also has beautiful sentences, and there are not enough of those in the world.

Sarah Hall

3. Then Later, His Ghost by Sarah Hall

This does one of my favourite things in a story: something you weren’t expecting. It’s an apocalypse tale, of which we seem to have had many lately and for which I am quite the sucker, but it’s a whole other and new form of apocalypse, wherein a howling wind rips everything loose from the ground. A real feat of imagination, and all the more terrifying for being set in the made-newly-strange streets of my Norwich childhood.

Kevin Barry

4. Fjord of Killary by Kevin Barry

Barry is great at drawing you quickly into the confidence of his voice; the first few sentences of any of his stories have that quality of strapping you in for the ride. “So I bought an old hotel on the fjord of Killary,” the narrator tells us at the outset of this one, and we can already hear the sigh in his voice. “It rained two hundred and eighty-seven days of the year, and the locals were given to magnificent mood swings.” We lean in, and listen on.

5. The News of her Death by Pettina Gappah

Five women talking in a hair salon while one of them has her braids done: this is all the narrative structure Gappah needs to build a complex social landscape, telling these women’s stories through perfectly pitched dialogue and delicately measured details. The recurring refrain that “Kindness is late” is brilliantly deployed, and the whole story quietly makes the point that hair is always political.

 Alejandro Zambra
Photograph by Ulf Anderse

6. Thank You by Alejandro Zambra, translated by Megan McDowell

As is usually the case, I’ve only just started reading Zambra after years of being urged to do so. This story, of a robbery that starts off violent before fizzling out into a chat about football and a lift home, is told in a jarringly languorous and anecdotal tone, which both draws you in and leaves you uncomfortably dissonant.

Hassan Blasim

7. The Green Zone Rabbit by Hassan Blasim, translated by Jonathan Wright

This story, from The Iraqi Christ, published by the excellent Comma Press, is by turns terrifying and wonderfully banal. In Baghdad’s Green Zone, Hajjar keeps a rabbit while waiting to be briefed on an operation. The rabbit lays an egg. Things get stranger and darker, and Blasim lays his tale out with a wonderfully dry bar-room simplicity that makes the ending all the more explosive.

Nicole Flattery

8. Track by Nicole Flattery

This recently won the White Review short story prize, and it’s not hard to see why. Written in a misleadingly offhand deadpan, Track covers seemingly familiar ground – an abusive relationship, a young woman adrift in the big city, the pitfalls of fame and money – at such an oblique angle that it demands repeated reading. It’s also very funny, and very sad.

Claire-Louise Bennett

9. Finishing Touch by Claire-Louise Bennett

I could have chosen any of the stories from Bennett’s debut collection, Pond – and in fact I would urge you to read the collection as a whole, its sum being, unusually, greater than the parts. I have plumped for this simply because it is so painfully funny. The narrator, “determined to host a low-key, but impeccably conceived, soirée”, details at great length her preparations and in the process reveals almost everything about her own hurt and loss. Bennett’s language is an ornate and long-winded riposte to all those pared-back minimalists, and I love it.

10. The Emerald Light in the Air by Donald Antrim

This is a stone-cold masterpiece, as you will see by following the link above. It proceeds with the strange and relentless quality of a dream or fable, while being almost macabre in its realism, and feels like the story Antrim has been writing towards for his whole career. The beauty of it is hard to pin down, but it has a finished and inevitable quality – which it’s occurring to me now could be called soul.

• The National short story award will be announced on 3 October on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row.

• Jon McGregor’s latest novel is Reservoir 13, published by Fourth Estate, priced £14.99. 

THE GUARDIAN

Multiple Choice by Alejandro Zambra review / Intriguing, but hardly nourishing

Alejandro Zambra

Multiple Choice by Alejandro Zambra review – intriguing, but hardly nourishing

Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra’s amusing linguistic acrobatics tease the brain but fail to dig deeper

Anthony Cummins
Sunday 23 October 2016 10.00 BST

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he structure of this intriguing little book draws on the national university entrance exam that Alejandro Zambra sat in his native Chile in 1993. Comprising 90 multiple-choice questions, it starts as comic wordplay but morphs gradually into a volley of melancholy nano-stories played out on terrain familiar from Zambra’s previous work: lazy schooldays, fizzled-out love affairs and the half-buried iniquities of life in a former dictatorship.

An early question asks us to mark one of five words with “no relation” to the word “blacklist”: “backlist”, “checklist”, “playlist”, “shitlist” and “novelist”. If that made you laugh, you’ll get on well with Multiple Choice, at least at first; the book’s energy leans heavily on the kind of category-switching curveball Zambra throws when he (or his presumably highly acrobatic translator, Megan McDowell) writes “novelist”.

Sometimes the change-ups do more than raise a smile: when we fill in the blanks in the sentence, “What is impossible for… is possible for…”, choosing from “men... God”, “men... women”, “the right... the left”, “Rebecca... Becky”, “the poor... the rich”, you wonder what Becky can do that she can’t as Rebecca. But mainly you feel the options play for laughs: one question asks if a particular story’s narrator doesn’t mention his wife’s name because “a) He wants to protect her” or “d) He’s a misogynist”.

Later we are invited to reorder the sentences in a series of deadpan five-step narratives that feature someone describing his conception during a curfew under Pinochet and (among others) a woman with breast cancer and dementia who can’t recognise her family but “never forgot she was missing a breast”.

While there’s a degree of brain-flexing fun to be had in thinking through the various permutations on offer, the sense grows that Zambra’s elaborate furniture is just that: a frictionless frame for stories that might have existed equally well on their own.

Proof, perhaps, comes in the book’s climactic comprehension exercises related to three memoir-ish stories, each a few pages long. The chewiest of them follows someone who tells his 18-year-old son that he left his mother because he felt too young to have a child. He admits that in his early 20s he readily used the phrase “I have a son” to mean “I’m a serious man, I have lived, I’m responsible, I have a history, so go to bed with me. And the next morning... Sorry, I have to go, you have to go, I have a son”.

In the appended questions, the comedy of Zambra’s absurdly divergent and digressive multiple-choice answers shades into glibness: when we’re asked which character we relate to most, the options include “none”, “the son, obviously” and “the mother, because I also got pregnant at that age, but I had an abortion. I regretted it so many times... but after reading this story I think it may not have been such a bad decision.”

Zambra is talented – no doubt about it – but it’s hard to escape the feeling that, despite its inventive form, Multiple Choice amounts to little more than a cute jeu d’esprit, amusing but hardly nourishing.

Multiple Choice is published by Granta (£12).

THE GUARDIAN

21 Books You Should Read This July / Three one

 

Jenni Fagan

21 Books You Should Read This July 

PART ONE

We Asked Lit Hub Contributors About What They're Looking Forward To

JULY 1, 2016

Pond, Claire-Louise Bennet (Riverhead Books)

Claire-Louise Bennett’s debut novel captures our attention in whispers more than it does with bells or whistles. It’s not a “loud” novel. It doesn’t explain or announce itself. What action there is, is retold from the distance that memory provides—a distance bridged by way of second-guesses and digressions. Pond is the expression of a delightfully melancholic voice, as serious as it is funny, strange yet so very familiar. Readers will rush to find suitable comparisons—mine was Samuel Beckett—but Bennett successfully squirms away at every turn, and achieves something singularly her own. It’s a funny, smart book, that will relocate you for a time in the rural headspace of Bennett’s unnamed narrator, where you too will find yourself diving into the grimy ground of the everyday.

–Brad Johnson (Co-Manager Diesel Bookstore)

You Will Know Me, Megan Abbot (Little, Brown & Co)

The Olympics start the first Friday in August, which means gymnastics will soon play an inexplicably prominent role in my life. I can’t say that I’ve ever watched a set of parents watching their daughter watch herself on the balance beam and thought, “somebody should set a murder mystery in that world,” but now that Megan Abbott has, with You Will Know Me, it strikes me as the best decision any writer has made in quite some time. Abbott is the author of The Fever and Dare Me, two favorites of literary-mystery lovers. Nobody captures the tortured relations between teens and adults quite like her. The high-tension world of competitive tumbling ought to be a perfect muse. And in any case this is the book that will help us all steel ourselves for that terrible, shimmering moment when the Károlyis first step onto the mat.

–Dwyer Murphy (Lit Hub contributor)

The Sunlight Pilgrims, Jenni Fagan (Hogarth)

I can’t wait for Jenni Fagan’s The Sunlight Pilgrims. The Scottish author’s debut novel, The Panopticon, gave us a world in which the most destitute among us were forced into imprisonment. With this new work, Fagan once again offers a critique of our planet, this time from a more geological perspective. Different regions of the world are experiencing the worst winter on record. Our most vital social systems—economic exchange, healthcare—are barely in operation, and people are dying in the streets from the cold. It’s against this setting that Dylan, a refugee from London, must determine the best way to survive. If this book is as good as her first, we’re in for a thrilling and elegant work of post-apocalyptic fiction.

–Amy Brady (Lit Hub contributor)

Vaseline Buddha, Jung Young Moon (Deep Vellum, trans. Jung Yewon)

Jung Young Moon’s Vaseline Buddha is a book about the act of writing. It opens with the narrator “unable to sleep, thinking vaguely that [he] would write a story.” In that first scene, he startles a would-be thief who is climbing up the gas pipes toward his bedroom window. The narrator wonders if it is his fault that the thief fell, wonders if there are some things in the world for which there is no fault. This opening “trivial” happening sets off a series of discursions, which some might disparage as literary navel-gazing or recollective free association, but which I found utterly fascinating and driven by an engaging voice. The book plays directly to the central questions of the act of writing: Should writing be driven by order or chaos? Should it structure the universe or reflect its seeming randomness? Is the imposition of form a virtue of a vice? On that front, it feels akin to writers like Gombrowicz and Beckett. Or maybe I’m just free associating? (Which I think the narrator of Vaseline Buddha would appreciate…)

–Tyler Malone (Lit Hub Contributing Editor,

The Scofield founder & Editor-in-Chief)

Multiple Choice, Alejandro Zambra (Penguin Books, trans. Megan McDowell)

I’ve never seen a writer attempt to structure a novel as a multiple choice test. Maybe it’s been done, or maybe Chilean author Alejandro Zambra is the first. Either way, it seems the perfect next step for an author who has always specialized in short, lyric works and who has increasingly embraced a hybrid genre of fiction that sort of acts like a novel but kind of looks like a short story collection. So, yes, he should further muddy the waters by turning this latest book into a standardized test that is made up of multiple choice questions that are in fact tiny, deconstructed narratives.

–Scott Esposito (Lit Hub contributor)

LIT HUB

https://lithub.com/21-books-you-should-read-this-july/

Alejandro Zambra / Windows on the World

Windows on the World

by Alejandro Zambra

Translated from the Spanish by Harry Backlund

A series on what writers from around the world see from their windows.

The Paris Review, April 5, 2013

I’m not sure that my little studio is the best place in the house to write. It’s too hot in summer and too cold in winter. But I like this window. I like those trees crossed by power lines and that slice of available sky. The silence is never absolute, or maybe it is—maybe my idea of silence now includes the constant barking of dogs and the uneven roar of motors. I take enormous pleasure in watching passersby, the odd cyclist, the cars.

When the writing isn’t happening I just sit there, absorbing the scenery, adoring it. I’m sure those minutes, those apparently lost hours, are useful in some way, that they’re essential for writing: that my books would be very different if I had written them in another room, looking out another window. 

Matteo Pericoli is a famous drawer of cities. He is known for his witty, loving, obsessively detailed renditions of the Manhattan coastline (Manhattan Unfurled), the perimeter of Central Park (Manhattan Within), and the banks of the River Thames (London Unfurled).

Several years ago, Matteo began to draw New York from a new vantage point—from its windows. He asked artists, writers, politicians, editors, and others involved with the cultural life of the city to let him draw whatever they saw when they looked outside. These were collected in the book The City Out My Window (and the view from 62 White Street appeared on the cover of The Paris Review).

In 2010, the project grew. Matteo was commissioned by The New York Times op-ed page to draw the window views of writers around the world, and the writers were asked to describe them. 

THE PARIS REVIEW