Search results for ""Author Ariel Dorfman""

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.

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"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 Books Combining 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.

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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.

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Told almost exclusively through dialogue, Konfidenz opens with a woman entering a hotel room and receiving a call from a mysterious stranger who seems to know everything about her and the reasons why she has fled her homeland. Over the next nine hours he tells her many disturbing things about her lover (who may be in great danger), the political situation in which they are enmeshed, and his fantasies of her. A terse political allegory that challenges our assumptions about character, the foundations of our knowledge, and the making of history, Konfidenz draws the reader into a postmodern mystery where nothing--including the text itself--is what it seems.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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