A breathtaking, nuanced collection of 8 stories about human connection in the face of cruelty, injustice, and uncertainty—from the acclaimed author of Death and the Maiden and Allegro.
Separated from his wife on the train to Bourges—where she is set to testify against the police agent who abused her during the Pinochet dictatorship 40 years ago—Rafael agonizes over a damning secret that he may be forced to reveal. Will dredging up the past heal their wounds or open new ones?
Leo, a terminally ill man, has decided to end his life, but not before fulfilling his promise to take his wife to visit the place where his late parents met amid the horrors of the Second World War, an almost magical journey that may lead him to change his mind.
These are tales that range wildly—a witchcraft trial during the Hundred Years War, a dispute with undocumented immigrants in the present-day United States, a bullet narrating the experience of a firing squad—from an author who has “create[d] methods of storytelling that enact, not merely record, a political vision, that fuse both the political and literary imaginations” (New York Times). A stunning new collection by a legendary writer who again explores how we struggle to keep love alive in even the darkest times.
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, whose award-winning books in many genres have been published in more than fifty languages and his plays performed in more than one hundred countries. Among his works are the plays Death and the Maiden and Purgatorio, the novels The Suicide Museum (Other Press, 2023), Allegro (Other Press, 2025), Widows, and Konfidenz (Other Press, 2026), and the memoirs Heading South, Looking North and Feeding on Dreams. He writes regularly for the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, New York Review of Books, The Nation, The Guardian, El País, and CNN. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, The Threepenny Review, and Index on Censorship, among others. A prominent human rights activist, he worked as press and cultural advisor to Salvador Allende’s chief of staff in the final months before the 1973 military coup, and later spent many years in exile. He lives with his wife Angélica in Santiago, Chile, and Durham, North Carolina, where he is the Walter Hines Page Emeritus Professor of Literature at Duke University.
View titles by Ariel Dorfman
A breathtaking, nuanced collection of 8 stories about human connection in the face of cruelty, injustice, and uncertainty—from the acclaimed author of Death and the Maiden and Allegro.
Separated from his wife on the train to Bourges—where she is set to testify against the police agent who abused her during the Pinochet dictatorship 40 years ago—Rafael agonizes over a damning secret that he may be forced to reveal. Will dredging up the past heal their wounds or open new ones?
Leo, a terminally ill man, has decided to end his life, but not before fulfilling his promise to take his wife to visit the place where his late parents met amid the horrors of the Second World War, an almost magical journey that may lead him to change his mind.
These are tales that range wildly—a witchcraft trial during the Hundred Years War, a dispute with undocumented immigrants in the present-day United States, a bullet narrating the experience of a firing squad—from an author who has “create[d] methods of storytelling that enact, not merely record, a political vision, that fuse both the political and literary imaginations” (New York Times). A stunning new collection by a legendary writer who again explores how we struggle to keep love alive in even the darkest times.
Reviews
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, whose award-winning books in many genres have been published in more than fifty languages and his plays performed in more than one hundred countries. Among his works are the plays Death and the Maiden and Purgatorio, the novels The Suicide Museum (Other Press, 2023), Allegro (Other Press, 2025), Widows, and Konfidenz (Other Press, 2026), and the memoirs Heading South, Looking North and Feeding on Dreams. He writes regularly for the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, New York Review of Books, The Nation, The Guardian, El País, and CNN. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, The Threepenny Review, and Index on Censorship, among others. A prominent human rights activist, he worked as press and cultural advisor to Salvador Allende’s chief of staff in the final months before the 1973 military coup, and later spent many years in exile. He lives with his wife Angélica in Santiago, Chile, and Durham, North Carolina, where he is the Walter Hines Page Emeritus Professor of Literature at Duke University.
View titles by Ariel Dorfman
