MORE OR TITLES
OF RELATED INTEREST
Homeland Security Ate My Speech
MESSAGES FROM THE END OF THE WORLD
“A literary grandmaster.” —Time
“One of the greatest novelists coming out of Latin America.” —Newsweek
“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
“A world novelist of the first order.” —The Washington Post
“[Dorfman] has written movingly and often brilliantly of the cultural dislocations and political fractures of his dual heritage.” —The New York Times
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Paperback: $18/£14
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E-book: $10/£8
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Print + E-book: $24/£18
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About the Book
Combining elements of memoir, political theory, satire, and literary criticism, literary legend Ariel Dorfman’s latest book is an emotionally raw yet measured assessment of the United States after the election of Donald Trump, highlighting 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 how America created 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.
224 pages • Paperback ISBN 978-1-682191-22-4 • E-book 978-1-682191-23-1
About the Author
Photo © Duke University
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Born in Argentina in 1942, Ariel Dorfman spent ten years as a child in New York, until his family was forced out of the United States by the anti-communist frenzy stirred by Joe McCarthy. The Dorfmans ended up in Chile, where Ariel spent his adolescence and youth, living through the Allende revolution and the subsequent resistance inside Chile, and abroad after the dictatorship that overthrew Allende in 1973. Accompanied by his wife Angélica, he wandered the globe as an exile, finally settling down in the United States, where he is now Walter Hines Emeritus Professor of Literature at Duke University. Dorfman’s acclaimed work, which includes the play and film “Death and the Maiden,” and the classic text about cultural imperialism, How to Read Donald Duck, covers almost every genre available (plays, novels, short stories, fiction, essays, journalism, opinion pieces, memoirs, and screenplays). His award-winning books have been published in more than fifty languages and his plays performed in over one hundred countries. He contributes regularly to major papers and magazines worldwide and has been active in the defense of human rights. |
In the Media
- “Sandra Cisneros Loves to Read” — Ariel Dorfman’s HOMELAND SECURITY ATE MY SPEECH featured in The New York Times (9/3/2021)
- ARIEL DORFMAN on the Vietnam War and how Hollywood reframes U.S. imperialism, at Democracy Now (5/7/2018)
- “Pedro Páramo is a cautionary tale, one that should resonate in our own era of brutal strongmen and rapacious billionaires”: ARIEL DORFMAN on why reading Juan Rulfo matters today (2/23/2018)
- A Lesson on Immigration from Pablo Neruda: ARIEL DORFMAN in the New York Times (2/21/2018)
- ARIEL DORFMAN at LitHub with an excerpt from HOMELAND SECURITY ATE MY SPEECH on the monster that is Donald Trump. (12/15/2017)
- At Counterpunch—leaked footage of ARIEL DORFMAN being interrogated by Homeland Security agents about his new book. (12/14/2017)
- “Anyone familiar with his work,” says Huffington Post on ARIEL DORFMAN, “will probably want to read his most recent book, and trace the bumpy intellectual journey he has made in the age of Donald Trump.” (12/12/2017)
- New York Journal of Books calls HOMELAND SECURITY ATE MY SPEECH “personal, intellectual, devastating, and at times bitingly funny.” (12/11/2017)
- “Walden on the Rocks.” ARIEL DORFMAN‘s latest in the New York Review of Books (11/29/2017)
- “Neruda, Pinochet and Rumors of Murder.” ARIEL DORFMAN in the New York Times (10/30/2017)
- “Children and Fear in Trump’s America.” ARIEL DORFMAN in the New York Times (10/16/2017)
- “Trump’s War on Knowledge.” ARIEL DORFMAN in the New York Review of Books (10/16/2017)
- “Nuclear Apocalypse Now?” ARIEL DORFMAN in the New York Review of Books (9/22/2017)
- “A Tale of Two Donalds.” ARIEL DORFMAN in TomDispatch (9/15/2017)
- “Remembering the Disappeared.” ARIEL DORFMAN in The New York Times (9/11/2017)
- “Donald Trump’s Total Eclipse.” ARIEL DORFMAN at Counterpunch (8/31/2017)
- “The ginkgos, Mr. Takahashi said, expressed better than anything he could say through an interpreter the endurance of hope, the need for peace and reconciliation.” ARIEL DORFMAN in The New York Times (8/8/2017)
- Shakespeare’s Torture Test—ARIEL DORFMAN in The New York Times (7/31/2017)
