Synopses & Reviews
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE SUMMER BY THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, ELLE, THE HUFFINGTON POST, THE MILLIONS, VOX, BBC, AND PUREWOW
"Latin America’s new literary star." —The New Yorker
"Brilliant . . . Like a literary exercise for the mind, but strangely fun to decode." —Elle
"The most talked-about writer to come out of Chile since Bolaño," (The New York Times Book Review), 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.
Review
"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...[The] multiple choice questions...are in fact tiny, deconstructed narratives." Literary Hub, "21 Books You Should Read This July"
Review
"An exercise in flouting literary conventions....This sly slender book is divided into 90 multiple-choice questions suggesting that how we respond to a story depends on where the writer places narrative stress. The witty follow-up questions suggest that the true beauty of fiction is that it has no use for pat answers." The Millions, "Most Anticipated: The Great Second-Half 2016 Book Preview"
Review
"Witty and experimental...It’s like taking a test by a test writer gone mad." Vox, "18 New Books to Read This Summer"
Review
"A brilliant, book-length meditation on the limits of meaning, or the lack thereof. Formatted as an SAT-style test, Multiple Choice uses the form of the dreaded standardized test to create a philosophical playground for readers that’s anything but standard." Huffington Post, "22 Summer 2016 Books You Won’t Want To Miss"
About the Author
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 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, 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.