What She Saw

Praise for My House Is on Fire:

“Stories Kafka could have created.” —Houston Chronicle

“The horrible dislocations in the normal human order are brilliantly and forcefully portrayed in every story in the collection…Dorfman has been called the moral conscience of his country. The stories in My House Is on Fire attest powerfully to both the strength of his witnessing and the imaginative brilliance of his art. These stories have resonance and timeliness, a rare combination that makes them universal; they are political fables in the best sense.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“The voices are assured, heartbreaking, and are bearing witness to an all-encompassing social suffering…Finally, it is the generosity and sadness of My House Is on Fire that stays with the reader, that accepting of what has been done to us, of what we have done to ourselves.” —Washington Post

“Captures the essence of…the conflict between decades of oppression and hopes of freedom…A poetic and conflictive sense of despair and triumph in the narrative voice.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

“A fearful and poignancy…Corrosive with ironies and sarcasms about the lives of ordinary people in Chile…Dorfman’s stories are rude only to torturers.” —Newsday

“Of all the Latin American writers to come out of that explosion of creativity familiarly known as ‘el boom,’ Ariel Dorfman is the one whose work I love best…He pushes the outer limits of the fictional envelope as daringly and imaginatively as Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez…But what makes Dorfman’s books especially appealing is the humanism of his vision.” —Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Dorfman continues to explore the devastated landscape of private life under government: he does so with great subtlety…In [his] hands, the imaginary takes on a sharp and sinister edge…Memorable, remarkable.” —Philadelphia Inquirer

Ariel Dorfman is a Chilean-American author, born in Argentina. His award-winning books in many genres have been published in more than fifty languages, and his plays have been performed in over one hundred countries.

Notable Works:

• Plays: Death and the Maiden, Purgatorio
• Novels: The Suicide Museum (2023), Allegro (2025), Widows, Konfidenz (2026)
• Memoirs: Heading South, Looking North, Feeding on Dreams

Publications and Contributions:

Dorfman writes regularly for publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, The Guardian, El Pais, and CNN. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, The Threepenny Review, and Index on Censorship, among others.

Activism and Academic Career:

A prominent human rights activist, Dorfman served as press and cultural advisor to Salvador Allende’s chief of staff in the final months before the 1973 military coup. He subsequently spent many years in exile.

He currently resides with his wife, Angelica, in Santiago, Chile, and Durham, North Carolina. In Durham, he holds the position of Walter Hines Page Emeritus Professor of Literature at Duke University.

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