[In the following excerpt, Hopkinson commends the emotional range of the stories in My House Is on Fire and praises Dorfman's attention to detail in his short fiction.]

For decades, publishers have told us that the short story is dead: not because people didn't want to write or read the things, but because they have lacked the wish to anthologise them. Yet one means by which stories have become part of an expanding market is through translation. Why? Is it simply because we assume that only foreigners are skilled in such an antiquated form? Or that, being foreign, we anticipate a childlike quality in their writing, and children's fairy stories are still sound business? Readers who accept these assumptions need look no further for a rude but salutary contradiction.

For in none of three newly translated volumes from the Southern Cone is there any hint of “magical realism”, still less of fairy tales. All are rich in imagination, but in an imagination fed and flourishing through the paradox of its attempted strangulation by brutal military regimes. The greater the official Philistinism, it would appear, the greater the ability of some human beings to escape or transcend the experience.

Just as well, since some of the horrors subverted here defy literal description. When they are so great, the smallest details become the most telling. The Chilean Ariel Dorfman (My House Is on Fire, Methuen; translators: George Shivers and the author) is probably the best-known of these authors: for his generous critical evaluations of fellow Latin Americans; for his barbed dissections of US cultural imperialism; and for flights of delicate invention mingled with failed sentiment in his own writing.

This collection includes some of his most recent and best stories. They tease the reader by suggesting any number of possible directions before ending at what suddenly becomes an inevitable destination. If you pick only three, try “Godfather”, with its dedication to assassinated President Allende; “Consultation”, in which a starved and tortured doctor is “consulted” by the lieutenant in charge on how to reduce his appetites; and “Crossings”, a story of repeated assignations between a man and a woman who meet only to exchange unspoken information. Then read on …