The Last Song of Manuel Sendero

Denying the future until government leaders end repression, revolutionary fetuses refusing to be born begin to argue amongst themselves and one by one choose to be born until only the son of Manuel Sendero is left

Literature & Fiction

Shivers, George R.

DORFMAN, ARIEL

Contemporary

Penguin??Books

Presents a man who has neither loved nor been loved and a young, pursued woman whose amnesia and openness make her the perfect woman

Mascara

British & Irish

In a nation ruled by a military regime, in a village nearly devoid of men, a single battered body is claimed by thirty-seven women whose sons, husbands, and fathers have "disappeared"

Widows (King Penguin)

Literary

In stories of lyrical, brutal beauty, a world is created that resonates with fear, betrayal, and authoritarianism, yet is lit by a resilient faith and hope. In the title story, a brother and sister build the “castle” of chairs and blankets all children have assembled, but their need to believe in its protection is all too real. In “Consultation,” an imprisoned doctor – tortured, bound, and naked – is consulted by the lieutenant in charge of his interrogation about going on a diet. And in “Reader,” a government censor, recognizing himself as the protagonist, allows the publication of a subversive story and waits his inevitable arrest. Told at times with lush exuberance and at others with a sparseness as raw as it burns, these stories have the power to move and enthrall. “Ariel Dorfman is one of the most important voices coming out of Latin America.” – Salman Rushdie “These stories attest to the imaginative brilliance of Dorfman’s art. They have resonance and timelessness, a rare combination that makes them universal.” –San Francisco Chronicle

My House Is on Fire

“Suspenseful, riveting . . . Achieves a universality that is movingly personal.” —The New York Times The explosively provocative, award-winning drama set in a country that has just emerged from a totalitarian dictatorship Gerardo Escobar has just been chosen to head the commission that will investigate the crimes of the old regime when his car breaks down and he is picked up by the humane doctor Roberto Miranda. But in the voice of this good Samaritan, Gerardo's wife, Paulina Salas, thinks she recognizes another man—the one who raped and tortured her as she lay blindfolded in a military detention center years before. Relentlessly paced and filled with lethal surprises, Death and the Maiden is an inquest into the darker side of humanity—one in which everyone is implicated and justice itself comes to seem like a fragile, perhaps ambiguous invention.

Death and the Maiden

Dramas & Plays

The Empire's Old Clothes: What the Lone Ranger, Babar, and Other Innocent Heroes Do to Our Minds

In this powerful cultural critique, Ariel Dorfman explores the political and social implications of the smiling faces that inhabit familiar books, comics, and magazines. He reveals the ideological messages conveyed in works of popular culture such as the Donald Duck comics, the Babar children's books, and Reader's Digest magazine.

History & Criticism

In this remarkable memoir, Dorfman describes an extraordinary life, torn between the United States, South America, and his Jewish heritage, between English and Spanish, between revolution and repression. Interwoven with the story of how Dorfman switched languages and countries--not once, but three times--is a day-to-day account of his multiple escapes from death during Pinochet's military takeover of Chile in 1973. Combining eight vignettes of his life before 1973 with eight scenes from the coup, Dorfman filters these events through an engaging, hybrid consciousness.A beautifully written and deeply moving auto-biography by one of the "greatest living Latin American writers" (Newsweek), Heading South, Looking North is at once a vivid account of a life as complex and mysterious as the fictional characters Dorfman has created, and an enthralling search for a permanent home, a political cause, and a cultural identity.

Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Penguin Publishing Group

Language Notes\nText: English, Spanish (translation)\nFrom Publishers Weekly\nThe Chilean author who taught us all How to Read Donald Duck here reminds us in a thumping collection of protest poetry that Chile is a country where dissidents continue to vanish without a trace, leaving behind torn families who cannot decide whether to hope that their loved ones are alive, or deadand beyond the possibility of torture. Eschewing political rhetoric, Dorfman adopts the personae of parents, spouses and children who, never even breathing the words "Pinochet" or "junta," long for knowledge of the fates of the Disappeared. Similarly, Dorfman describes the helpless isolation of the exile in two consecutive poems that both conclude: "I hang up the phone and begin to call the newspapers one by one to give them the name of the companero who has been arrested, the name of the companero I don't know." In the tradition of Latin American protest literature, this is a call to conscience that appeals to our most basic human instinctsthe love of mother for child, wife for husband. 
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.\nFrom Library Journal\nThis slim volume of "torture and resilience" poetry by Chilean exile Dorfman is heavy going, but necessary reading if any portion of the human race is ever to be moved to action against the unblushing brutality of some Latin American regimes. The poet asks forgiveness lest any accidental rhymes or rhythms creep into his work to detract from the starkness of his descriptions of electric shock, the stuffing of live rats into the vagina of a woman, or a mother's gratitude when she hears about her son's screams of torture, knowing at last that he is at least alive. For most poetry collections.Jack Shreve, Allegany Community Coll., Cumberland, Md. 
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The Last Waltz in Santiago: And Other Poems of Exile and Disappearance (Poets, Penguin)

Puffin

Konfidenz

Sceptre

Heading South, Looking North

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