In Case of Fire in a Foreign Land

Ariel Dorfman is a world-renowned author of fiction, poems, essays, and films in both Spanish and English. His books have been translated into more than thirty languages, and his plays staged in more than one hundred countries. His work has received many prizes, among them the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Play. He holds the Walter Hines Page Chair at Duke University and contributes regularly to many newspapers worldwide. Among Dorfman‘s publications are the reissue of his novel Widows (2002), Blake’s Therapy (2001), the memoir Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey (1998), and the play Death and the Maiden (1992). The poems in In Case of Fire in a Foreign Land have been read publicly by Bono, Emma Thompson, Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Ben Kingsley, Harold Pinter, John Malkovich, and many others, and have been transformed into films, art exhibits, and cantatas.Edith Grossman has translated the novels of Gabriel GarcÍa MÁrquez and Mario Vargas Llosa.

“[These poems] manage to speak with great directness of the . . . suffering and dread in his own country-and, by implication, in much of the world today-and yet to be maps of the imagination, the compassionate imagination. . . .Writing like this is a rare source of hope."-W. S. Merwin "Ariel Dorfman’s testaments of pain and outrage are indeed poems. They will outlast the oppression, the torture, the misery of exile of which they tell. ‘Many are called’ to write of these matters, but ‘few are chosen.’ Dorfman is one of the few."-Denise Levertov "As long as poems such as these are written and published, the Pinochets of the world cannot have the last say."-Breyten Breytenbach Praise for Ariel Dorfman’s poetry:"A deeply moving collection from one of Chile’s most important writers. . . .Stark and at the same time oddly radiant."-Margaret Atwood