What She Saw

“A superb collection of eight trenchant stories about witnesses to war, criminality, and other atrocities, and the quest for closure and restitution.” —Shelf Awareness

“Dorfman writes interior monologues with real intensity as he portrays men diminished by guilt and hesitation and women left bearing the brunt of the damage.” —Booklist

Praise for My House Is on Fire:

“Stories Kafka could have created.” —Houston Chronicle

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

“These stories have resonance and timeliness, a rare combination that makes them universal; they are political fables in the best sense.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Dorfman captures the essence of this conflict [in the political culture between decades of oppression and hopes of freedom]…Dorfman’s mastery as a storyteller makes reading these stories most worthwhile.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

“These eleven passionate, brilliant tales…bear forceful and yet subtle witness to the plight of a people mortally divided against itself…superb.” —Publishers Weekly

“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, spanning multiple genres, have been published in over fifty languages and his plays performed in more than one hundred countries.

Selected 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

Dorfman is a regular contributor to 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 also appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, The Threepenny Review, and Index on Censorship.

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 later lived in exile for many years.

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

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