Other Septembers, Many Americas
Selected Provocations, 1980-2004

Included in Other Septembers, many Americas are major essays about the America South of the border, exploring the ambiguous relationship between power and literature and touching on topics as diverse as bilingualism, barbarians and video games.

/ Included in Other Septembers, Many Americas are major essays about the America south of the border, exploring the ambiguous relationship between power and literature and touching on topics as diverse as bilingualism, barbarians and video games. In the essay 'A Different Drum', Dorfman asks, 'Isn't it time, as war approaches yet again, to tell each other stories of peace over and over again?' / Over and over in these jewel-like essays, his best shorter work of the last quarter-century, Dorfman weaves together sentiment and politics with his sense of the larger historical questions, reminding Americans of our unique role in the world, so different from the one put forward by the current US administration: the power to resist and to imagine.

By Way of Introduction / Part One: I Have Been Through This Before In Which the Author Explores Some Reactions to the September 11th attacks / 1. The Last September 11th / 2. Globalizing Compassion: Photography and the Challenge of Terror / 3. Love Letter to America / 4. Cold Waters / 5. Pablo Picasso has Some Words for Colin Powell from the Other Side of Death / 6. Letter to an Unknown Iraqi Dissident / 7. A Different Drum / Part Two: Yesterday Is Still Here / In Which the Author Explores Why the People of the United States Need to Face Their Past... / 1. Hymn For the Unsung / 2. The 19 and the 84 / 3. The Face, the Voice, the Eyes of the enemy / 4. Get Rich, Young Man / 5. Norteamericanos, Call Home / 6. Down Mexico Way... Before the Subcomandante came along... / 7. Finding the Fever / 8. Miss Margarida's Way / 9. Dreams of a Bilingual Nation / 10. Questions for Humanity / Part Three: Troubled Bridges / In Which the Author Explores the Continuing Enigma of Latin America / 1. Who Are the Real Barbarians: Memory and the Fate of Latin America / 2. Will the Duendes Prowl in Santiago? 3. The Day I Failed to be Che Guevara / 4. Rubber Soul / 5. A Hopeful Parable of Doom / 6. Here come the Duendes again. / 7. The Clowns Come to the Revolution / 8. The Return of Che / 9. Wandering on the Boundaries of Development: The Last Journey of the Matacos / 10. The True Miracle of Elian / 11. The Latin American Aesthetics of Hope / Part Four: Imagining A Way Out In Which the Author Explores Why Questions Are Better than Answers / 1. The Wandering Bigamists of Language / 2. Moving Away from the Known / 3. Final and First Words to Death and the Maiden / 4. Message from a King of Troy / 5. And They Lived Heartlessly Ever After / 6. Surviving the Century: filming with Roman Polanski / 7. Conjuros: The Bull in the Labyrinth of Chile and Spain / 8. Confessions from Another South, Other Wars / 9. Writing Voices From Beyond the Dark / 10. Love Letter to Sarajevo - a poem / 11. Writing the Deep South / 12. The Hidden Censors / 13. The Children Are Watching/ 14. Letter to the Sixth Billionth World Citizen Conclusion As Manifesto: Imagining a Possible Peace