Chilean poet - alejandro zambra

A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR A WALL STREET JOURNAL TOP 10 BOOK OF THE YEAR ONE OF NPRS BOOKS WE LOVE A tender and funny story about love, family and the peculiar position of being a stepparent.

[ Chilean Poet ] broadens the authors scope and quite likely his international reputation.

-- Los Angeles Times Zambra [is] one of the most brilliant Latin American writers of his generation.

-- The New York Review of Books Zambras books have long shown him to be a writer who, at the sentence level, is in a world all his own.

--Juan Vidal, NPR.

org A writer of startling talent ( The New York Times Book Review ), Alejandro Zambra returns with his most substantial work yet: a story of fathers and sons, ambition and failure, and what it means to make a family After a chance encounter at a Santiago nightclub, aspiring poet Gonzalo reunites with his first love, Carla.

Though their desire for each other is still intact, much has changed: among other things, Carla now has a six-year-old son, Vicente.

Soon the three form a happy sort-of family--a stepfamily, though no such word exists in their language.

Eventually, their ambitions pull the lovers in different directions--in Gonzalos case, all the way to New York.

Though Gonzalo takes his books when he goes, still, Vicente inherits his ex-stepfathers love of poetry.

When, at eighteen, Vicente meets Pru, an American journalist literally and figuratively lost in Santiago, he encourages her to write about Chilean poets--not the famous, dead kind, your Nerudas or Mistrals or Bolaños, but rather the living, striving, everyday ones.

Prus research leads her into this eccentric community--another kind of family, dysfunctional but ultimately loving.

Will it also lead Vicente and Gonzalo back to each other? In Chilean Poet , Alejandro Zambra chronicles with enormous tenderness and insight the small moments--sexy, absurd, painful, sweet, profound--that make up our personal histories.

Exploring how we choose our families and how we betray them, and what it means to be a man in relationships--a partner, father, stepfather, teacher, lover, writer, and friend--it is a bold and brilliant new work by one of the most important writers of our time.