Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times (March 2022)
Azar Nafisi returns with a guide to the power of literature in turbulent times, arming readers with a resistance reading list, ranging from James Baldwin to Zora Neale Hurston to Margaret Atwood.
What is the role of literature in an era when one political party wages continual war on writers and the press? What is the connection between political strife in our daily lives, and the way we meet our enemies on the page in fiction? How can literature, through its free exchange, affect politics?
In this galvanizing guide to literature as resistance, Nafisi seeks to answer these questions. Drawing on her experiences as a woman and voracious reader living in the Islamic Republic of Iran, her life as an immigrant in the United States, and her role as literature professor in both countries, she crafts an argument for why, in a genuine democracy, we must engage with the enemy, and how literature can be a vehicle for doing so.
Structured as a series of letters to her father, who taught her as a child about how literature can rescue us in times of trauma, Nafisi explores the most probing questions of our time through the works of Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, James Baldwin, Margaret Atwood, and more.
Read more about this forthcoming book on the HarperCollins website here.
Access The Progressive Magazine’s review here, the Starred Publishers Weekly’s Review here, and the Toronto Star’s review here.
“Nafisi’s prose is razor-sharp, and her analysis lands on a hopeful note...This excellent collection provokes and inspires at every turn”
“Read Dangerously lives up to its audacious title, demonstrating the subversive and transformative power of literature. It should start many a book-based conversation, among the living and the dead.”
“In ‘Read Dangerously,’ Azar Nafisi reminds us that great books can transcend prejudices”
That Other World: Nabokov and the Puzzle of Exile (2019)
The ruler of a totalitarian state seeks validation from a former schoolmate, now the nation’s foremost thinker, in order to access a cultural cache alien to his regime. A literary critic provides commentary on an unfinished poem that both foretells the poet’s death and announces the critic’s secret identity as the king of a lost country. The greatest of Vladimir Nabokov’s enchanters—Humbert—is lost within the antithesis of a fairy story, in which Lolita does not hold the key to his past but rather imprisons him within the knowledge of his distance from that past.
In this precursor to her international best seller Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi deftly explores the worlds apparently lost to Nabokov’s characters, their portals of access to those worlds, and how other worlds hold a mirror to Nabokov’s experiences of physical, linguistic, and recollective exile. Written before Nafisi left the Islamic Republic of Iran, and now published in English for the first time and with a new introduction by the author, this book evokes the reader’s quintessential journey of discovery and reveals what caused Nabokov to distinctively shape and reshape that journey for the author.
“Empathetic, incisive. . . . A sweeping overview of Nabokov’s major works. . . . Graceful [and] discerning. ”
“Somewhere between a first-person encounter with literature and a critical study, this book reminds us of how meaningful literature can be.”
The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books (2014)
In this electrifying follow-up, she argues that fiction is just as threatened—and just as invaluable—in America today.
Blending memoir and polemic with close readings of her favorite novels, she describes the unexpected journey that led her to become an American citizen after first dreaming of America as a young girl in Tehran and coming to know the country through its fiction. She urges us to rediscover the America of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and challenges us to be truer to the words and spirit of the Founding Fathers, who understood that their democratic experiment would never thrive or survive unless they could foster a democratic imagination. Nafisi invites committed readers everywhere to join her as citizens of what she calls the Republic of Imagination, a country with no borders and few restrictions, where the only passport to entry is a free mind and a willingness to dream.
“We are all citizens of Azar Nafisi’s Republic of Imagination. Without imagination there are no dreams, without dreams there is no art, and without art there is nothing. Her words are essential.”
“A passionate argument for returning to key American novels in order to foster creativity and engagement… Literature, writes Nafisi, is deliciously subversive because it fires the imagination and challenges the status quo… Her literary exegesis lightly moves through her own experience as a student, teacher, friend and new citizen. Touching on myriad examples, from L. Frank Baum to James Baldwin, her work is both poignant and informative.”
“In The Republic of Imagination, the mirror-image of her first book, Nafisi explores the influence fiction has had on life in America, where literature, while not outlawed, is endangered… Her opening tribute to the power of literature segues into revelatory close readings of the three novels she selected, after much deliberation, as salient expressions of the American spirit, specifically our restlessness, ‘unending questioning,’ and perpetual sense of outsiderness… As a deeply engaged envoy from that republic, Nafisi urges us to read widely and inquisitively.”
Things I’ve Been Silent About (2008)
A stunning personal story of growing up in Iran, memories of her life lived in thrall to a powerful and complex mother, against the background of a country’s political revolution. A girl’s pain over family secrets; a young woman’s discovery of the power of sensuality in literature; the price a family pays for freedom in a country beset by political upheaval—these and other threads are woven together in this beautiful memoir, as a gifted storyteller once again transforms the way we see the world and “reminds us of why we read in the first place.”
“A gifted storyteller with a mastery of Western literature, Nafisi knows how to use language both to settle scores and to seduce.”
“An immensely rewarding and beautifully written act of courage, by turns amusing, tender and obsessively dogged.”
Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003)
Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the girls in Azar Nafisi’s living room risked removing their veils and immersed themselves in the worlds of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov. In this extraordinary memoir, their stories become intertwined with the ones they are reading. Reading Lolita in Tehran is a remarkable exploration of resilience in the face of tyranny and a celebration of the liberating power of literature.
Link to Margaret Atwood’s Review (2003)
“Resonant and deeply affecting . . . an eloquent brief on the transformative powers of fiction—on the refuge from ideology that art can offer to those living under tyranny, and art’s affirmative and subversive faith in the voice of the individual”
“[A] vividly braided memoir…Anguished and glorious.”
“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”
“A poignant, searing tale about the secret ways Iranian women defy the regime. . . . [Nafisi] makes you want to rush back to all these books to experience the hidden aspects she’s elucidated.”
“An intimate memoir of life under a repressive regime and a celebration of the vitality of literature . . . as rich and profound as the novels Nafisi teaches.”
“Transcends categorization as memoir, literary criticism or social history, though it is superb as all three . . . Nafisi has produced an original work on the relationship between life and literature.”
“[A] sparkling memoir . . . a spirited tribute both to the classics of world literature and to resistance against oppression.”
Bibi e la voce verde (2006)
Translates as “BiBi and the Green Voice,” is a children’s book authored in Italian.