My Documents by Alejandro Zambra

My Documents, from Alejandro Zambra, the award-winning Chilean writer whose first novel was heralded as the dawn of a new era in Chilean literature, is described by Junot Díaz as “a total knockout.” In his first short story collection, Zambra gives us eleven stories of liars and ghosts, armed bandits and young lovers—brilliant portraits of life in Chile before and after Pinochet. The cumulative effect is that of a novel—or of eleven brief novels, intimate and uncanny, archived until now in a desktop folder innocuously called “My Documents.” Zambra’s remarkable vision and erudition is on full display here; this book offers clear evidence of a sublimely talented writer working at the height of his powers.

“This dynamite collection of stories has it all—Chile and Belgium, exile and homecomings, Pinochet and Simon and Garfunkel—but what I love most about the tales is their strangeness, their intelligence, and their splendid honesty.”
—Junot Díaz, The New Yorker

“Zambra is the author of small classics—short in length, but enormous in every other way. My Documents elevates him to an entirely new level.”
—Valeria Luiselli