Ariel Dorfman Books In Order

Resistance Trilogy Books In Order

  1. Widows (1983)
  2. Death and the Maiden (1991)
  3. Reader (1995)

Novels

  1. The Last Song of Manuel Sendero (1987)
  2. Mascara (1988)
  3. Hard Rain (1990)
  4. Konfidenz (1994)
  5. The Nanny and the Iceberg (1999)
  6. Missing Continents (1999)
  7. Blake’s Therapy (2001)
  8. The Rabbits’ Rebellion (2001)
  9. The Burning City (2003)
  10. Darwin’s Ghosts (2018)
  11. Cautivos (2020)

Collections

  1. My House Is on Fire (1990)

Plays

  1. Purgatorio (2006)
  2. The Other Side (2006)

Novellas

  1. The Compensation Bureau (2021)

Non fiction

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Ariel Dorfman Books Overview

Widows

Set in a Greek village in 1942, and purportedly written from his imagination by a Danish man before he was picked up by the Gestapo and not seen again, here is Ariel Dorfman’s haunting and universal parable of individual courage in the face of political oppression. Widows forms a testament to the disappeared those living under totalitarian regimes the world over, who are taken away for ‘questioning’ and never return. One by one, the bodies of men wash up on the shore of the river, where they are claimed by the women of the local town as husbands and fathers, even though the faces of the dead men are unrecognizable. A tug of war ensues between the local police, who insist that the women couldn t possibly recognize their loved ones, and the women demanding the right to bury their beloveds. As it evolves, the stand off reveals itself to be a power struggle between love, dignity and honor, and the lesser god of brute force. A lesson in how power really works, and how it can be made to work differently.

Death and the Maiden

Generally, it’s the tortured who turn into torturers.” Carl Gustav Jung. Suspense mounts when Paulina and her husband offer hospitality to a stranger. Paulina thinks she recognizes, in their guest, the man who tortured her in prison, and she subsequently takes him hostage to find out the truth. A stunningly blunt and compelling play, Death and the Maiden explores brilliantly the issues of torture, power, vulnerability, ethics, and trust. An award winning play by Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman, forced into exile in 1973. A L.A. Theatre Works full cast performance featuring: John Kapelos, John Mahoney, Carolyn Seymour and Kristoffer Tabori.

Mascara

‘A tantalizingly ambiguous web of deceit, intrigue, and obsession, its layers of meaning gradually revealed…
. The reader is left in delicious puzzlement.’ Publishers Weekly

Mascara, Ariel Dorfman’s haunting English language debut novel, delves into the dark terrain of identity and disguise when the lives of three people collide. A nameless man with a face no one remembers has the devastating ability to see and capture on film the brutal truths lurking inside each person he encounters. Oriana, a beautiful woman with the memory of an innocent child, is relentlessly pursued by mysterious figures from her past. Doctor Mavirelli is a brilliant and power hungry plastic surgeon who controls society’s most prominent figures by controlling their most important asset: their faces. As their three fates cross, present and past deceptions unravel upon each other until the characters find themselves irrevocably unmasked.

Ariel Dorfman is a Chilean expatriate whose works include the acclaimed memoir Heading South, Looking North; the novels The Last Song of Manuel Sendero, Konfidenz and Widows; and the play Death and the Maiden, which was made into a film by Roman Polanski. Dorfman’s plays have been performed in more than 100 countries, and he is the recipient of numerous international awards in drama and literature. Dorfman contributes to major newspapers worldwide and is a distinguished professor at Duke University. He lives with his wife in Durham, North Carolina.

Konfidenz

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. First published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1995, most recent paperback Vintage 1998.

The Nanny and the Iceberg

Back in print, The Nanny and the Iceberg is Dorfman’s dark comedy of politics, sex, and death. The virginal 23 year old Gabriel McKenzie returns from exile in Manhattan to his native Chile to confront his complicated legacy, which includes a Don Juan father and a faithful, if eccentric, nanny.

Blake’s Therapy

Blake’s Therapy is a whirlwind ride through the desires of one man to find something real in a virtual world. After suffering a mental breakdown, Graham Blake checks into the Corporate Life Therapy Institute, where the self assured, silver tongued Dr. Carl Tolgate has prepared a strange, shocking, and erotic treatment. Now Blake must find out, before it is too late, who is controlling his life, his company’s future, and his own heart. A work of intense psychological intrigue, Blake’s Therapy holds a magnifying glass to one man s life as it unravels in a world of economic turmoil and spiritual crisis.

The Burning City

It is the simmering summer of 2001 in New York City. Heller is the youngest employee of Soft Tidings, a messenger service whose motto is news with a personal touch. At Soft Tidings, a message is not handed over but told to the recipient. And the messages, as a rule, are not especially good news. Heller prefers his bike to the mandatory Rollerblades, and he gets away with his maniacal bike riding because he is, hands down, the best deliverer of bad news. This summer will be memorable for Heller as he finds himself drawn into the lives of a wildly diverse cast of characters, accidentally falling in love, and relating to people in a whole new way. From the Hardcover edition.

My House Is on Fire

In these short stories, Dorfman writes of love and betrayal, of families broken apart by hope and fear, of personal lives invaded by political authority, and of men and women who long for privacy.

Purgatorio

West End opening for world premiere of new play by the author of Death and the Maiden starring Rupert Graves A Man and a Woman who are timeless versions of the mythical Jason and Medea have entered purgatory: a soul less white room. Each is interrogated in turn by the other. Each has to reach a state of forgiveness and contrition before they can leave purgatory and ‘move on’. In the course of all this the Medea ‘story’ is reprised particularly from her point of view. An outstanding moment is when she recalls with terrible reality how she actually killed her children: including the horrifying decision as to which one to kill first while the other looks on. Purgatory is like Sartre’s Huis Clos rewritten by Kafka. The whole play has a hypnotic, mesmeric, circular quality: the end links up to the beginning in a seamless round. It is a play brim*ming with ideas, blending myth with multifold literary references. There has been nothing as serious and ambitious on the London stage for years.

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