Azar Nafisi September 18, 2008 |
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“A memoir about teaching Western literature in revolutionary Iran, with profound and fascinating insights into both. A masterpiece.” —Bernard Lewis, author of The Crisis of Islam?
“[A] vividly braided memoir...anguished and glorious.” –Cynthia Ozick, The New Republic
“Stunning...a literary life raft on Iran’s fundamentalist sea...All readers should read it.” –Margaret Atwood
“Remarkable...an eloquent brief on the transformative power of fiction.” —The New York Times
“Certain books by our most talented essayists...carry inside their covers the heat and struggle of a life’s central choice being made and the price being paid, while the writer tells us about other matters, and leaves behind a path of sadness and sparkling loss. Reading Lolita in Tehran is such a book.” –Mona Simpson, The Atlantic Monthly
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Azar Nafisi is the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, which has been translated into 32 languages and received many awards. In 2006 she won a Persian Golden Lioness Award for literature, presented by the World Academy of Arts, Literature, and Media. Nafisi is a Visiting Professor and the director of the Dialogue Project at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC, where she is a professor of aesthetics, culture, and literature. She is also the author of Anti-Terra: A Critical Study of Vladimir Nabokov’s Novels, and she wrote the new introduction to the Modern Library Classics edition of Tolstoy’s Hadji Murad, as well as the introduction to Iraj Pezeshkzad’s My Uncle Napoleon, published by Modern Library. She has published a children’s book (with illustrator Sophie Benini Pietromarchi) BiBi and the Green Voice and is currently working on two books, the first entitled The Republic of the Imagination, which is about the power of literature to liberate minds and peoples. The other, Things I Have Been Silent About, is a memoir about her mother. She lives in Washington, DC.
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