Chilean-American author and human rights activist Ariel Dorfman's many internationally acclaimed works of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction include his bestselling memoir, Heading South, Looking North, which was the basis for the documentary film A Promise to the Dead, directed by Peter Raymont and shortlisted for an Academy Award in 2008. His play Death and the Maiden, staged in more than one hundred countries, was made into a feature film by Roman Polanski. Dorfman is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the New York Times Book Review, and the Huffington Post. He is a Walter Hines Page Research professor of literature and Latin American studies at Duke University, and his numerous international honors include his delivery of the Mandela Lecture in Johannesburg in 2010.

"A beautifully crafted, searing memoir" about fleeing Chile after the Pinochet coup, and the exile's yearning for home (Kirkus Reviews).
"A multifaceted journey that is geographical, personal and political . . . A complex, nuanced view of United States-Latin American politics and relations of the last forty some years." -Durham Herald-Sun

"One of the most important voices coming out of South America." -Salman Rushdie

In September 1973, the Chilean Armed Forces overthrew Socialist President Salvador Allende, ushering in the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. Ariel Dorfman, a young leftist loyal to Allende, was forced to flee for his life. In Feeding on Dreams, Dorfman portrays, through visceral scenes and startling honesty, the personal and political maelstroms that have defined his life since the coup.

Dorfman's wry and masterfully told account takes us on a page-turning tour through the past several decades of North-South political history, and the complex consequences of revolution and tyranny-excavating for the first time his profound and provocative journey as an exile and the ramifications for his wife and family.

"Fascinating." -San Francisco Examiner

"A compelling, profound portrait . . . A work to savor." -The Boston Globe

"A book that will simultaneously undo us and sustain us." -Tikkun