A Christmas Story
- Author: Alejeandro Zambra (Chile)
- Book type: christmas story
- English tranlation: Megan McDowell
- Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
- To be released: November 19, 2026
- Length: 64 pages
- Format: paperback / ebook
- Prize: £ 10.99
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Alejandro Zambra A Christmas Story reviews and information
Whenever a review of A Christmas Story the book, written by Alejandro Zambra, the author form Chile, appears in the media, we’ll highlight it on this page.
- “It is unusual for a footnote to transform a text radically, but that is what happens here… The notes and the text converse with one another; there is a back-and-forth that expands the story into a metatextual realm… Perhaps for the first time, we are able to see an editor at work, and this makes us think about those same words more deeply and vividly; it releases us from the enchantment of fiction and returns us to the work of literature itself.” (Mercedes Halfon, Página 12)
- Alejandro Zambra and Andrés Braithwaite have devised a superb literary artefact: a revolving mirror in which they are both reflected. It is a riotously funny but deeply serious game in which, beyond the personal relationship between author and editor, what ultimately matters is the text itself.” (Ignacio Echevarría, El Cultural)
- “The most talked-about writer to come out of Chile since Bolaño.” (The New York Times)
Blurb of the Christmas Story by Alejandro Zambra
In the winter of 2002, an aspiring writer is hired to review books for the cultural pages of a Santiago newspaper. What follows is an apprenticeship with his editor, David Tightwad: columns filed at midnight, two-hour arguments over a single adjective, long evenings drinking beer and talking about literature. Tightwad edits his protegé’s sentences, his commas, his enthusiasms and – on one unforgettable occasion – his facial hair. Then something small and unforgivable takes place, and the two men stop speaking. Twenty years later, over cold pizza in Mexico City, they try to work out what happened.
A Christmas Story is a book with the beams exposed – introduced and footnoted by Alejandro Zambra’s very own editor, Andrés Braithwaite, and annotated again in English by Megan McDowell, who argues with her own editor in the notes. In her brilliantly playful translation and interventions, the story of the relationship between a writer and his editor takes on extra layers of meaning, revealing how conversations and doubts begin to overflow beyond the page, the text, the language, and the work itself, forging bonds that no longer cling to literature alone, but to life.
Alejandro Zambra was born September 24, 1975 in Santiago, Chile. He is the author of the novels Chilean Poet, Multiple Choice, Ways of Going Home, The Private Lives of Trees and Bonsai; the short story collections My Documents and Childish Literature; and the essay collection Not to Read. The recipient of numerous prizes, including a Cullman Center Fellowship from the New York Public Library, his stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Paris Review, Granta, McSweeney’s and Harper’s, among others. He lives in Mexico City.