Ariel Dorfman – författare

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.

Formerly exiled Chilean author Ariel Dorfman, one of Latin America's greatest writers and a major literary figure of the twentieth century, is known for such critically acclaimed works as the novel Widows and the play Death and the Maiden. A master of various literary forms, this collection draws together Dorfman's critical essays on contemporary Latin American writing. Spanning more than twenty years and arranged in chronological order, each essay is devoted to a single author-Miguel Angel Asturias, Jorge Luis Borges, JosÉ Maria Arguedas, Alejo Carpentier, Gabrial Garcia MÁrquez, Roa Bastos-and one final essay looks at the "testimonial" or concentration camp literature from Chile.Praise for Ariel Dorfman“One of the most important voices coming out of Latin America.”-Salman Rushdie“A remarkable writer . . . writing out of a very different cultural perspective from comfortable American readers.”-Digby Diehl, Los Angeles Herald Examiner“One of the six greatest Latin American novelists.”-Jacobo Timmerman, Newsweek

In the world of Chilean poet Ariel Dorfman, men and women can be forced to choose between leaving their country or dying for it. The living risk losing everything, but what they hold onto-love, faith, hope, truth-might change the world. It is this subversive possibility that speaks through these poems. A succession of voices-exiles, activists, separated lovers, the families of those victimized by political violence-gives an account of ruptured safety. They bear witness to the resilience of the human spirit in the face of personal and social damage in the aftermath of terror. The first bilingual edition of Dorfman’s work, In Case of Fire in a Foreign Land includes ten new poems and a new preface, and brings back into print the classic poems of the celebrated Last Waltz in Santiago. Always an eloquent voice against the ravages of inhumanity, Dorfman’s poems, like his acclaimed novels, continue to be a searing testimony of hope in the midst of despair.

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. The Empire’s Old Clothes was widely praised when it was first published in 1983. This edition, including a new preface by the author, makes a contemporary classic newly available.

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.

“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.”

A smouldering political allegory about a political protest in a country ruled by a military junta. From the author of Death and the Maiden, written in collaboration with Tony Kushner, author of Angels in America.In a war-torn village the men have disappeared. The women – their mothers, wives, daughters – wait by the river, hope and mourn. Their anguish is unspoken until bruised and broken bodies begin being washed up on the banks and the women defy the military in the only form of protest left to them.Ariel Dorfman’s play Widows is based on his 1983 novel of the same name. The play was first presented by the Traverse Theatre Company at the Cambridge Arts Theatre in March 1997. (An earlier version of the play was first performed at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in July 1991).

A classic of 20th-century theatre, Ariel Dorfman's Death and the Maiden ran for a year in the West End, was a hit on Broadway and was filmed by Roman Polanski starring Ben Kingsley and Sigourney Weaver.A woman seeks revenge when the man she believes to have been her torturer happens to re-enter her life.Death and the Maiden was given a first reading at the Institute for Contemporary Art in London in November 1990. After a workshop production staged in Santiago, Chile, in March 1991, the play had its world premiere at the Royal Court Upstairs, London, in July 1991, transferring to the Main Stage at the Royal Court in October.The play then transferred to the West End, at the Duke of York's Theatre, in February 1992.Death and the Maiden won the 1992 Olivier Award for Best New Play.

A powerful and poetic play, with echoes of Jean-Paul Sartre's Huis Clos and Euripides' Medea. From the author of Death and the Maiden.A Man and a Woman in purgatory – a soul-less white room. Each is interrogated in turn by the other. Each is groping for forgiveness and contrition. But one of them has done something unforgiveable...Ariel Dorfman's play Purgatorio was first performed at the Seattle Repertory Theatre, Seattle, USA, in November 2005. (An earlier version was first performed in a rehearsed reading at the Criterion Theatre, London, in November 2001).The play was first staged in the UK at the Arcola Theatre, London, in January 2008.

"A worthy addition to the library of resistance." —Kirkus"Dorfman’s critique is personal, intellectual, devastating, and at times bitingly funny." —New York Journal of BooksCombining elements of memoir, political theory, and literary criticism, Ariel Dorfman’s Homeland Security Ate My Speech is an emotionally raw yet measured assessment of the United States after the election of Donald Trump. Dorfman, writing with a bifurcated Latino-American identity, highlights the troubling parallels between Trump and repressive regimes of the past. Specifically, Dorfman relates the election of Trump to the CIA-led coup that installed Pinochet as dictator in Chile: an event that upended Dorfman’s life, as well as the fate of the country. With corruption and repression looming, he wonders, can the United States avoid the same kind of political interference it practiced in the past?Reflecting Dorfman’s virtuosity across genres, the essays of Homeland Security Ate My Speech are concise, yet highly original and playful; one takes the form of a letter from a sixteenth-century King of Spain to Donald Trump, praising him for his intolerance, and urging a revival of the Inquisition, while another begins with Dorfman’s memory of seeing a monster movie as a child ("I can remember gripping my mother’s hand tight") and segues into a thoughtful meditation on Trump via Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. Dorfman brings a rich array of literary references to his discussion of America’s current malaise; other authors he invokes include Faulkner, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Melville, Lewis Carroll, and Dave Eggers.