Heading South Looking North

The story of many exiles and three countries and two languages.

Focusing on his repeated escapes from death during a military coup in Chile, an acclaimed Latin American novelist and Chilean expatriate traces influences of American and Latin American culture, politics, and language on his life

Dorfman portrays, through visceral scenes and powerful intellect, the personal and political maelstroms underlying his migrations from Buenos Aires, on the run from Pinochet's death squads, to safe houses in Paris and Amsterdam, and eventually to America, his childhood home. The toll on Dorfman's wife and two sons, the 'earthquake of language' that is bilingualism, and his eventual questioning of his allegiance to past and party - all these crucibles of a life in exile are revealed with wry and startling honesty. Feeding on Dreams is a passionate reminder that 'we are all exiles', that we are all 'threatened with annihilation if we do not find and celebrate the refuge of common humanity', as Dorfman did during his 'decades of loss and resurrection'.

The Norte Grande of Chile, the world's driest desert, had ''engendered contemporary Chile, everything that was good about it, everything that was dreadful,'' writes Ariel Dorfman in his brilliant exploration of one of the least known and most exotic corners of the globe. For 10,000 years the desert had been mined for silver, iron, and copper, but it was the 19th-century discovery of nitrate that transformed the country into a modern state and forced the desert's colonization. The mines' riches generated mansions and oligarchs in Chile's more temperate region—and terrible inequalities throughout the country. The Norte Grande also gave birth to the first Chilean democratic and socialist movements, nurturing every major political figure of modern Chile from Salvador Allende to Augusto Pinochet. In this richly layered personal memoir, illustrated with the author's own photographs, Dorfman sets out to explore the origins of contemporary Chile—and, along the way, seek out his wife's European ancestors who came years ago to Chile as part of the nitrate rush. And, most poignantly, he looks for traces of his friend and fellow 1960s activist, Freddy Taberna, executed by a firing squad in a remote Pinochet death camp.

Freelance travel writer and Lonely Planet guidebook contributor Tim Richards decides to shake up his life by taking an epic rail journey across Australia. Jumping aboard iconic trains like the Indian Pacific, Overland, and Spirit of Queensland, he covers over 7,000 kilometres, from the tropics to the desert and from big cities to ghost towns. Tim's journey is one of classic travel highs and lows: floods, cancellations, extraordinary landscapes, and forays into personal and public histories—as well as the steady joy of random strangers encountered along the way.

Denying the future until government leaders end repression, revolutionary fetuses refusing to be born begin to argue amongst themselves and one by one choose to be born until only the son of Manuel Sendero is left.

In this interlocking prose web of first-person testimony, novelist, poet, and playwright Ariel Dorfman relates the struggles of fifty human rights activists hailing from more than forty countries. Manifesto for Another World features the words and struggles of internationally celebrated activists including Vaclav Havel, Baltasar Garzón, Helen Prejean, and Marian Wright Edelman; and Nobel Prize Laureates the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, Elie Wiesel, Oscar Arias Sánchez, Rigoberta Menchú Tum, José Ramos-Horta, and Bobby Muller. Equally moving are the stories of more than thirty others, unknown and (as yet) unsung beyond their national boundaries: Kailash Satyarthi, who has spent a lifetime working to free tens of thousands of victims of child labor in his native India, and Juliana Dogbadzi, who was sold into sexual slavery by her parents at age twelve, escaped after seventeen degrading years, and now is devoted to the liberation of African girls bound in the same terror. From their ranging voices Dorfman culls the message: freedom from persecution, and freedom of opportunity, for all. Manifesto for Another World is both a political testament and a work of art.

From the author of Death and the Maiden and other works that explore relations of power in the postcolonial world comes the story of a man whose distant past comes to haunt him. Is the sordid story behind human zoos that flourished in Europe in the nineteenth century connected somehow to a boy's life a hundred years later? On Fitzroy Foster's fourteenth birthday on September 11, 1981, he receives an unexpected and unwelcome gift: when his father snaps his picture with a Polaroid, another person's image appears in the photo. Fitzroy and his childhood sweetheart, Cam, set out on a decade-long journey in search of this stranger's identity—and to reinstate his own—across seas and continents, into the far past and the evil and good that glint in the eyes of the elusive visitor. Seamlessly weaving together fact and fiction, Darwin's Ghosts holds up a different light to Conrad's "The horror! The horror!" and a different kind of answer to the urgent questions, Who are we? And what can we do about it?