About this item
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.
About the Author
Ariel Dorfman is a Chilean-American author born in Argentina, whose books have been published in over fifty languages and his plays performed in more than one hundred countries. His novels, poetry, essays, plays, stories and screenplays have won numerous awards. Among his works are the plays Death and the Maiden and Purgatorio, the novels Widows and Konfidenz, and the memoirs Heading South, Looking North and Feeding on Dreams. His most recent books are a collection of essays, Homeland Security Ate My Speech: Messages from the End of the World and the forthcoming novel, Darwin's Ghosts. He contributes to major papers worldwide, including frequent contributions to The New York Times and the New York Review of Books Daily. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harper's, Playboy, Index on Censorship and many other magazines and journals. A prominent human rights activist, he lives with his wife Angélica in Chile and Durham, North Carolina, where he is the Walter Hines Page Emeritus Professor of Literature at Duke University.
