SOURCE: Hopkinson, Amanda. “Silencers.” New Statesman and Society 5, no. 210 (10 July 1992): 40-1.

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...