Homeland Security Ate My Speech: Messages from the End of the World - Hardcover

Praise for Homeland Security Ate My Speech

"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

Praise for Ariel Dorfman

"A literary grandmaster." --Time

"One of the greatest novelists coming out of Latin America." --Newsweek

"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

Selected Awards
The Kennedy Center/American Express New Plays Award, 1988, for Widows
Roger L. Stevens Award, Extraordinary Playwrighting, 1991, for Reader
Time Out Award, 1991, for best play in London, Death and the Maiden
Sir Laurence Olivier Award, 1992, for best play in London, Death and the Maiden
Literary Lion, New York Public Library, 1992
2001 Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Honorary Degrees
Illinois Wesleyan University, Doctor of Humane Letters, 1989
Wooster College, Doctor of Letters, 1991
Bradford College, Doctor of Humane Letters, 1993
American University, Doctor of Humane Letters, 2001
Franklin and Marshall College, Doctor of Humane Letters, 2011

"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

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. 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.