Ariel Dorfman

The political and the personal blur through a series of tense, tantalizing conversations about resistance. A pared-back yet gripping psychological novel from the acclaimed author of Death and the Maiden and Allegro. The gifted and versatile Ariel Dorfman's novel, written almost entirely in dialogue, develops a feverish intensity as it charts the relationship between its two principal characters in a setting that is deliberately left vague. A woman, Barbara, has been brought to Paris to see Martin, her lover. At her hotel, she takes a phone call from Leon, who claims to be Martin's friend and informs her that her lover is doing resistance work and could soon be in great danger. During a series of phone calls that lasts for nine hours, alliances shift and the nature of the men's political mission becomes both more and, paradoxically, less clear. Leon, a skilled manipulator, seduces Barbara with words, yet he clearly wants something from her that isn't entirely sexual. By the time their political and personal situations are entirely obvious to the reader, nothing is as it first seemed. A political novel as well as an acute study in character and obsession, complete with interspersed commentary apparently addressed to the reader and the novelist equally, this brief, tightly constructed work addresses multiple themes. Dorfman uses the tension of an unstable political situation to force the reader into questioning his characters' stated truths, as well as their motivations.

This thrilling historical mystery starring Mozart tells of friendship and betrayal, and how music allows us to defy death--from the acclaimed author of Death and the Maiden and The Suicide Museum. In 1789 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart visits the grave of Johann Sebastian Bach in Leipzig, looking for a sign, a signal, an answer to an enigma that has haunted him since childhood: Was Bach murdered by a famous oculist? And years later, was Handel a victim of the same doctor? Allegro follows his investigation, from the salons of London to the streets of Paris, recreating an enthralling and turbulent time, full of rogues and brilliant composers, charlatans and presumptuous nobles. Running parallel to this search is the rise of Mozart, his knowledge and fame, his trials and losses.

A billionaire Holocaust survivor hires a writer to uncover the truth of Salvador Allende's death, and they must confront their own dark histories to find a path forward--for themselves and for our ravaged planet. An expansive, engrossing mystery for fans of Isabel Allende, Jeff VanderMeer, and Bill McKibben, from the acclaimed author of Death and the Maiden. Ariel needed money, and Joseph Hortha had it. Bound by gratitude toward the late Chilean president and a persistent need to know whether murder or suicide ended his life during the 1973 coup, the two men embark on an investigation that will take them from Washington DC and New York, to Santiago and Valpara so, and finally to London. They encounter an unforgettable cast of characters: a wedding photographer who can predict a couple's future; a policeman in pursuit of the serial killer targeting refugees; a revolutionary caught trying to assassinate a dictator; and, above all, the complex women who support them along the way, for their own obscure reasons. Before Ariel and Joseph can resolve a quest full of dangers and enigmas, they must help each other come to terms with guilt and trauma from personal catastrophes hidden deep in the past. What begins as an intriguing literary caper unfolds into a propulsive, philosophical saga about love, family, machismo, fascism, and exile that asks what we owe the world, one another, and ourselves. By boldly mixing fiction and reality, imagination and history, The Suicide Museum explores the limits of the novelistic genre, expanding it in an unsuspected and exceptional way.

“I have created for each of you a fate, one tailored specifically for your needs and desires. Each of you has a defining moment—not before, not after—when a wrong turn or decision led to the disastrous outcome that you and I mourn. To isolate that malignant moment is an exacting, exhaustive process, which only the most well-trained and competent professionals, armed with the most sophisticated of predictive models and processing power, can accomplish. You can put your trust in me, as you would in an expert surgeon, a surgeon of the soul.” On a distant planet overlooking Earth, the nameless protagonist of The Compensation Bureau is one of a team of Actuaries at work on the innovative Lazarus Project. Conceived in response to the shocking violence observed in humankind, the project identifies people who have wrongfully died at the hands of others—whether victims of war, hate crimes, or random brutality—and attempts to compensate for the cruelty and pain they faced in life and death. But balancing the accounts for the sufferings and wrongdoings of humanity proves hardly a clinical exercise. The Actuary soon finds himself personally invested in the project’s mission, and the goals of the project itself are complicated as the fate of Earth’s inhabitants becomes more uncertain. The Compensation Bureau explores the power of individual and collective action, from a writer hailed by The Washington Post as “a world-novelist of the first category.”

From the author of Death and the Maiden and other works that explore relations of power in the postcolonial world comes the story of a man whose distant past comes to haunt him. Is the sordid story behind human zoos that flourished in Europe in the nineteenth century connected somehow to a boy's life a hundred years later? On Fitzroy Foster's fourteenth birthday on September 11, 1981, he receives an unexpected and unwelcome gift: when his father snaps his picture with a Polaroid, another person's image appears in the photo. Fitzroy and his childhood sweetheart, Cam, set out on a decade-long journey in search of this stranger's identity--and to reinstate his own--across seas and continents, into the far past and the evil and good that glint in the eyes of the elusive visitor. Seamlessly weaving together fact and fiction, Darwin's Ghosts holds up a different light to Conrad's "The horror The horror " and a different kind of answer to the urgent questions, Who are we? And what can we do about it?

This short novel is about confinement, both of the mind and of the body, and therefore also about liberation.Set in the last years of the 16th century, Cautivos is a meditation on writing, writers, and creativity. Then as now, Islam and Christianity were at loggerheads and women found themselves playing new roles, and imprisonment or worse was society’s answer to everything from murder to dissent. Writer/activist Ariel Dorfman imagines for us scenes from the picaresque life of Miguel de Cervantes, a man who wrestled as intensely with the contradictions implicit in writing fiction—how can one write something “real” if it is labelled fiction, but in fact how can one write anything “real” unless it is fiction?—as any scribbler who followed him in the centuries since. Cervantes, of course, was the soldier, spy and adventurer who in 1605 gave the world Don Quixote, often described as the first modern novel, a book that has influenced Western culture perhaps more than any other book save the Bible. In Cautivos, we are witness to the birth of the spirit of Don Quixote de la Mancha: an honorable if doomed figure whose travails mirror those of Miguel de Cervantes himself. Few writers have written more lovingly about their subjects than Cervantes wrote about his Quixote, and few are better positioned to appreciate the spiritual journey of Cervantes himself than Ariel Dorfman, who—not unlike Cervantes—has been alternately hounded and fêted by those in authority.

First published in 1971, How to Read Donald Duck shocked readers by revealing how capitalist ideology operates in our most beloved cartoons. Having survived bonfires, impounding and being dumped into the ocean by the Chilean army, this controversial book is once again back on our shelves. Written and published during the blossoming of Salvador Allende's revolutionary socialism, the book examines how Disney comics not only reflect capitalist ideology, but are active agents working in this ideology's favour. Focusing on the hapless mice and ducks of Disney, curiously parentless, marginalised and always short of cash, Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart expose how these characters established hegemonic ideas about capital, race, gender and the relationship between developed countries and the Third World. A devastating indictment of a media giant, a document of twentieth-century political upheaval, and a reminder of the dark undercurrent of pop culture, How to Read Donald Duck is once again available, together with a new introduction by Ariel Dorfman.

First published in 1971, How to Read Donald Duck shocked readers by revealing how capitalist ideology operates in our most beloved cartoons. Having survived bonfires, impounding and being dumped into the ocean by the Chilean army, this controversial book is once again back on our shelves. Written and published during the blossoming of Salvador Allende's revolutionary socialism, the book examines how Disney comics not only reflect capitalist ideology, but are active agents working in this ideology's favour. Focusing on the hapless mice and ducks of Disney, curiously parentless, marginalised and always short of cash, Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart expose how these characters established hegemonic ideas about capital, race, gender and the relationship between developed countries and the Third World. A devastating indictment of a media giant, a document of twentieth-century political upheaval, and a reminder of the dark undercurrent of pop culture, How to Read Donald Duck is once again available, together with a new introduction by Ariel Dorfman.

From the author of Death and the Maiden and other works that explore relations of power in the postcolonial world comes the story of a man whose distant past comes to haunt him. Is the sordid story behind human zoos that flourished in Europe in the nineteenth century connected somehow to a boy's life a hundred years later? On Fitzroy Foster's fourteenth birthday on September 11, 1981, he receives an unexpected and unwelcome gift: when his father snaps his picture with a Polaroid, another person's image appears in the photo. Fitzroy and his childhood sweetheart, Cam, set out on a decade-long journey in search of this stranger's identity--and to reinstate his own--across seas and continents, into the far past and the evil and good that glint in the eyes of the elusive visitor. Seamlessly weaving together fact and fiction, Darwin's Ghosts holds up a different light to Conrad's "The horror The horror " and a different kind of answer to the urgent questions, Who are we? And what can we do about it?

Chosen as a Best Book of 2017 by Publishers Weekly "Journalist Gibler's investigative prowess yields a book that uses a chorus of voices--eyewitness accounts of the students and others at the scene--to add depth and clarity to the Sept. 26, 2014, massacre of students in the city of Iguala, Mexico, that left six people dead, 40 wounded, and 43 students missing who have yet to be seen since. It's an unforgettable reconstruction of a national tragedy."--Publishers Weekly, Best of 2017, Nonfiction " . . . valuable oral history . . ."--Rachel Nolan, London Review of Books"In Mexico, John Gibler's book has been recognized as a journalistic masterpiece, an instant classic, and the most powerful indictment available of the devastating state crime committed against the 43 disappeared Ayotzinapa students in Iguala. This meticulous, choral recreation of the events of that night is brilliantly vivid and alive, it will terrify and inspire you and shatter your heart."--Francisco Goldman, writer for The New Yorker, author of The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City ChronicleOn September 26, 2014, police in Iguala, Mexico attacked five busloads of students and a soccer team, killing six people and abducting forty-three students--now known as the Iguala 43--who have not been seen since. In a coordinated cover-up of the government's role in the massacre and forced disappearance, Mexican authorities tampered with evidence, tortured detainees, and thwarted international investigations. Within days of the atrocities, John Gibler traveled to the region and began reporting from the scene. Here he weaves the stories of survivors, eyewitnesses, and the parents of the disappeared into a tour de force of journalism, a heartbreaking account of events that reads with the momentum of a novel. A vital counter-narrative to state violence and impunity, the stories also offer a testament of hope from people who continue to demand accountability and justice. John Gibler lives and writes in Mexico. He is the author of Torn from the World, Mexico Unconquered: Chronicles of Power and Revolt, To Die in Mexico: Dispatches From Inside the Drug War, 20 poemas para ser le dos en una balacera, Tzompaxtle: La fuga de un guerrillero. His work on Ayotzinapa has been published in California Sunday Magazine, featured on NPR's "All Things Considered," and praised by The New Yorker. More praise for John Gibler's I Couldn't Even Imagine That They Would Kill Us: "The hideous Ayotzinapa atrocity reveals with vivid horror how Mexico is being destroyed by the US-based 'drug war' and its tentacles, penetrating deeply into the security system, business, and government, and strangling what is decent and hopeful in Mexican society. Gibler's remarkable investigations lift the veil from these terrible crimes and call for concerted action to extirpate the rotten roots and open the way for recovery from a grim fate."--Noam Chomsky"Journalist Gibler delivers a meticulous and affecting recreation of the events of Sept. 26, 2014, in Iguala, Mexico, when police attacked five buses carrying students from the Ayotzinapa Teachers' College and a youth soccer team. . . . It's a heartbreaking reconstruction of a horrific event, made all the more profound by the persistent demand from the parents of the disappeared, their classmates, and citizens across country for the safe return of the students."--Publishers Weekly Starred Review "This is an essential work of exacting, caring, and memorializing reportage."--Booklist, Starred Review"An oral history of one horrific night when busloads of unarmed students were attacked by local Mexican police. . . . cumulatively very moving."--Kirkus Reviews"A powerful and searing account of a devastating atrocity. Gibler's innovative style takes us on a compelling journey through a landscape of terror and brutality against those whose only crime was to demand the freedom to think."--Brad Evans, columnist on violence for the New York Times and the Los Angeles Review of Books "We are fortunate to now have in English, John Gibler's courageous account and oral history of the 2014 atrocity in Mexico in which 43 students vanished from the face of the earth and remain absent, while six more people (three of them students) were found dead, one of them mutilated. The US 'war on drugs' has unleashed decades of unimaginable and hideous terrorism in Mexico, just as the 'war on terror' is doing in the Middle East. The cruel viciousness of Ayotzinapa, with the 48 families of all the disappeared, murdered, and critically wounded students insisting on answers from the Mexican government, opens the door to a powerful resistance movement, which also requires U.S. citizens to insist on ending the US war against the Mexican people, which began in the 1820s and has never abated."--Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, and the forthcoming The US-Mexican War, 1846-1848"The value of Gibler's book is not that he tells us or posits that that night (September 26-27, 2014) was a historical turning point. Instead, what is so astonishing is that, using documentary writing, he shows us how the protagonists of the events themselves discover suddenly that they live in a different world than the one they were used to only a few hours before. The book illustrates with precision the move from a Mexico before to a Mexico after that which we have decided to call 'Ayotzinapa.'"--Guillermo Espinosa Estrada, Horizontal"The afterword is particularly important: it clears up details of that night as well as exposes the cover-ups, tampering with evidence and lies the police and government officials at the highest levels continue to insist are fact. By pulling together all these traumatic narratives, Gibler helps the parents of the disappeared throughout Mexico say, 'Basta' (enough). They won't give up on searching for their loved ones and for the truth."--Lee E. Cart, Shelf Awareness"Gibler determined the story was best told through 'writing by listening, ' and here he weaves a narrative of the harrowing events through the words of the students, offering multiple points of view. The families of the missing then offer their accounts as they seek answers from the government, which was complicit not only in the attacks but in covering up the truth of what happened. The result is a raw and vulnerable glimpse into the violence that continues to affect parts of Mexico and the pain of parents who still don't know what happened to their children."--Library Journal

Text in Arabic. Tense and tightly woven, Thiqah is a dramatic novel set in Paris during World War II about a woman whose lover is accused of working for the Resistance. The novel follows nine hours of phone conversations between a woman and a mysterious stranger who seems to know everything about her and the reasons she fled her homeland. As the dialogue progresses, the man tells her many disturbing things about her and her lover (who may be in great danger), the political situations in which they are enmeshed, and his fantasies about her. Powerful and menacing, Thiqah draws the reader into a post-modern mystery where nothing -- including the text itself -- is what it seems.

An old man and an old woman live in a hut near the border between two states, Tomis and Constanza, which have been constantly at war with each other for thirty years. The man comes from Tomis, the woman from Constanza. Their job is to collect bodies from the battlefield, log them with skin and hair samples, and bury them in temporary graves to await proper identification. Suddenly the shelling stops and a guard arrives to impose a border right through the middle of their house, insisting that the man stay one side, the woman the other...Ever since having to leave his native Chile when the democratic government was overthrown by General Pinochet, Ariel Dorfman has written on 'big' themes: torture in Death and the Maiden, state-sponsored 'disappearance' in Widows, and censorship in Reader. This new play, The Other Side, dealing with the grim absurdity of war and the borders over which it is fought, is his most powerful piece since Death and the Maiden. The Other Side is premiered in a production by Peter Hall starring Zoe Wanamaker and Bill Paterson. It opens at Bath Theatre Royal, then tours before coming in to the West End.

"A multifaceted journey that is geographical, personal and political . . . A complex, nuanced view of United States-Latin American politics and relations of the last forty some years." -- Durham Herald-Sun "One of the most important voices coming out of South America." -- Salman Rushdie In September 1973, the military took power in Chile, and Ariel Dorfman, a young leftist allied with President Allende, was forced to flee for his life. In Feeding on Dreams, Dorfman portrays, through visceral scenes and with startling honesty, the personal and political maelstroms that have defined his life since the Pinochet coup. Dorfman's wry and masterfully told account takes us on a page-turning tour of the past several decades of North-South political history and of the complex consequences of revolution and tyranny, excavating for the first time his profound and provocative journey as an exile and the consequences for his wife and family. "Fascinating." -- San Francisco Examiner "A great book that will simultaneously undo us and sustain us." -- Tikkun