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 protegés’ 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.
A Christmas Story
Translated by Megan McDowell, with an introduction by Andrés Braithwaite
French paperback with flaps, 64 pages
Published 19 November 2026
A Christmas Story
Translated by Megan McDowell, with an introduction by Andrés Braithwaite
A CHRISTMAS STORY
In the winter of 2002, I had the good fortune of meeting David Tightwad, who was soon to become my editor. I liked to call him that, my editor, as if he were mine alone –
I guess to show off a little, and also because sometimes
I really did think of him as mine, just as he thought that I, in a way, belonged to him.
‘I didn’t have time to read your material,’ he told me the morning of my interview, ‘but I’ll read it right now. It’ll take me a cigarette, maybe a cigarette and a half. Do you smoke?’
‘Yes,’ I replied.
That wasn’t true, or not entirely, since I had quit a few months earlier. But at that moment it seemed rude to turn down the friendly cigarette Tightwad offered me, which I consumed quickly and nervously while he read those book reviews I had written out of idleness, just to sugarcoat my unemployment a little.
After skimming a few pages, he looked up and asked, ‘Melville or Conrad?’
‘Laurence Sterne,’ I replied coyly.
‘Laurence Sterne or D. H. Lawrence?’
‘Lawrence of Arabia.’
‘Lorenzo the Magnificent or Joan the Mad?’
‘Joan of Arc.’
‘Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz or Saint John of the Cross?’
‘Juana de América.’
‘Bertrand Russell or Raymond Roussel?’
‘That one’s more complicated.’ (…)
‘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
‘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
‘There are no solitary literatures; we write thanks to others. Braithwaite defines his profession as “a companionship that erases itself ”. The reader does not perceive it, but it is there. In an age that is far too literal-minded, we dispense with the hands-on editor: the necessary ghost. Alejandro Zambra has found the most fitting way to preserve him: by turning him into literature.’
— Juan Villoro, El Siglo de Durango
‘Now I know that an editor is a kind of older brother, who educates, protects and represses us – or perhaps, quite simply, a second father, whom we never stop loving, respecting, and fearing, even as we later challenge him and, sooner or later, in order to grow, or simply to survive, deny him as many times as necessary, until we end up stabbing him in the back – psychoanalytically speaking, of course.’
— Alejandro Zambra
‘What matters in a book happens fundamentally in that dialogue between two solitary figures: the one who writes and the one who edits.’
— Andrés Braithwaite
‘Every beat and pattern of being alive becomes revelatory and bright when narrated by Alejandro Zambra. He is a modern wonder.’
— Rivka Galchen, author of Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch
‘The most talked-about writer to come out of Chile since Bolaño.’
— New York Times
‘Strikingly original.’
— James Wood, New Yorker
‘When I read Zambra I feel like someone’s shooting fireworks inside my head.’
— Valeria Luiselli, author of Lost Children Archive
Alejandro Zambra was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1975. 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.
Megan McDowell is an award-winning Spanish-language translator. She has translated books by Alejandro Zambra, Samanta Schweblin, Mariana Enríquez and Lina Meruane, among others, and her short story translations have appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Harper’s and The White Review. She lives in Santiago, Chile.
