Reading Lolita in Tehran Book
Score: 3.5
From 149 Ratings

Reading Lolita in Tehran

  • Author : Azar Nafisi
  • Publisher : Random House
  • Release Date : 2003-12-30
  • Genre: Biography & Autobiography
  • Pages : 384
  • ISBN 10 : 9781588360793
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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • We all have dreams—things we fantasize about doing and generally never get around to. This is the story of Azar Nafisi’s dream and of the nightmare that made it come true. For two years before she left Iran in 1997, Nafisi gathered seven young women at her house every Thursday morning to read and discuss forbidden works of Western literature. They were all former students whom she had taught at university. Some came from conservative and religious families, others were progressive and secular; several had spent time in jail. They were shy and uncomfortable at first, unaccustomed to being asked to speak their minds, but soon they began to open up and to speak more freely, not only about the novels they were reading but also about themselves, their dreams and disappointments. Their stories intertwined with those they were reading—Pride and Prejudice, Washington Square, Daisy Miller and Lolita—their Lolita, as they imagined her in Tehran. Nafisi’s account flashes back to the early days of the revolution, when she first started teaching at the University of Tehran amid the swirl of protests and demonstrations. In those frenetic days, the students took control of the university, expelled faculty members and purged the curriculum. When a radical Islamist in Nafisi’s class questioned her decision to teach The Great Gatsby, which he saw as an immoral work that preached falsehoods of “the Great Satan,” she decided to let him put Gatsby on trial and stood as the sole witness for the defense. Azar Nafisi’s luminous tale offers a fascinating portrait of the Iran-Iraq war viewed from Tehran and gives us a rare glimpse, from the inside, of women’s lives in revolutionary Iran. It is a work of great passion and poetic beauty, written with a startlingly original voice. Praise for Reading Lolita in Tehran “Anyone who has ever belonged to a book group must read this book. Azar Nafisi takes us into the vivid lives of eight women wh

Reading Lolita in Tehran Book
Score: 3.5
From 138 Ratings

Reading Lolita in Tehran

  • Author : Azar Nafisi
  • Publisher : Hachette UK
  • Release Date : 2013-01-01
  • Genre: Biography & Autobiography
  • Pages : 311
  • ISBN 10 : 9780733630538
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A professor teaches seven women forbidden literature in revolutionary Iran. For two years before she left Iran in 1997, Azar Nafisi gathered seven young women at her house every Thursday morning to read and discuss forbidden works of Western literature. Some came from conservative and religious families, others were progressive and secular: several had spent time in jail. They were shy and uncomfortable at first, unaccustomed to being asked to speak more freely, not only about the novels they were reading but also about themselves, their dreams and disappointments. Their stories intertwined with those they were reading — Pride and Prejudice, Washington Square, Daisy Miller and Lolita — their Lolita, as they imagined her, in Tehran. Reading Lolita in Tehran offers a fascinating portrait of the Iran-Iraq war viewed from Tehran and gives us a rare glimpse, from the inside, of women’s lives in revolutionary Iran. It is a work of great passion and poetic beauty, written with a startlingly original voice.

Reading Lolita in Tehran Book
Score: 3.5
From 138 Ratings

Reading Lolita in Tehran

  • Author : Azar Nafisi
  • Publisher : Random House Trade Paperbacks
  • Release Date : 2003-12-30
  • Genre: Biography & Autobiography
  • Pages : 386
  • ISBN 10 : 9780812971064
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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • We all have dreams—things we fantasize about doing and generally never get around to. This is the story of Azar Nafisi’s dream and of the nightmare that made it come true. For two years before she left Iran in 1997, Nafisi gathered seven young women at her house every Thursday morning to read and discuss forbidden works of Western literature. They were all former students whom she had taught at university. Some came from conservative and religious families, others were progressive and secular; several had spent time in jail. They were shy and uncomfortable at first, unaccustomed to being asked to speak their minds, but soon they began to open up and to speak more freely, not only about the novels they were reading but also about themselves, their dreams and disappointments. Their stories intertwined with those they were reading—Pride and Prejudice, Washington Square, Daisy Miller and Lolita—their Lolita, as they imagined her in Tehran. Nafisi’s account flashes back to the early days of the revolution, when she first started teaching at the University of Tehran amid the swirl of protests and demonstrations. In those frenetic days, the students took control of the university, expelled faculty members and purged the curriculum. When a radical Islamist in Nafisi’s class questioned her decision to teach The Great Gatsby, which he saw as an immoral work that preached falsehoods of “the Great Satan,” she decided to let him put Gatsby on trial and stood as the sole witness for the defense. Azar Nafisi’s luminous tale offers a fascinating portrait of the Iran-Iraq war viewed from Tehran and gives us a rare glimpse, from the inside, of women’s lives in revolutionary Iran. It is a work of great passion and poetic beauty, written with a startlingly original voice. Praise for Reading Lolita in Tehran “Anyone who has ever belonged to a book group must read this book. Azar Nafisi takes us into the vivid lives of eight women wh

The Republic of Imagination Book
Score: 4
From 7 Ratings

The Republic of Imagination

  • Author : Azar Nafisi
  • Publisher : Penguin
  • Release Date : 2014-10-21
  • Genre: Biography & Autobiography
  • Pages : 352
  • ISBN 10 : 9780698170339
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A New York Times bestseller The author of the beloved #1 New York Times bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran returns with the next chapter of her life in books—a passionate and deeply moving hymn to America Ten years ago, Azar Nafisi electrified readers with her multimillion-copy bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran, which told the story of how, against the backdrop of morality squads and executions, she taught The Great Gatsby and other classics of English and American literature to her eager students in Iran. 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.

Jasmine and Stars Book
Score: 3.5
From 6 Ratings

Jasmine and Stars

  • Author : Fatemeh Keshavarz
  • Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
  • Release Date : 2007
  • Genre: Literary Criticism
  • Pages : 188
  • ISBN 10 : 9780807831090
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In a direct, frank, and intimate exploration of Iranian literature and society, scholar, teacher, and poet Fatemeh Keshavarz challenges popular perceptions of Iran as a society bereft of vitality and joy. Her fresh perspective on present day Iran provides

Iranian Women in the Memoir Book

Iranian Women in the Memoir

  • Author : Emira Derbel
  • Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
  • Release Date : 2017-05-11
  • Genre: Biography & Autobiography
  • Pages : 230
  • ISBN 10 : 9781443892667
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This book investigates the various reasons behind the elevation of the memoir, previously categorized as a marginalized form of life writing that denudes the private space of women, especially in Western Asian countries such as Iran. Through a comparative investigation of Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (1) and (2), the book examines the way both narrative and graphic memoirs offer possibilities for Iranian women to reclaim new territory, transgress a post-traumatic revolution, and reconstruct a new model of womanhood that evades socio-political and religious restrictions. Exile is conceptualized as empowering rather than a continued status of loss and disillusionment, and the liminality of both women writers turns into a space of artistic production. The book also resists the New Orientalist scope within which Reading Lolita in Tehran, more than Persepolis, has been misread. In order to reject these allegations, this work sheds light on the representation of Iranian women in Reading Lolita in Tehran, not as weak victims held captive by a totalitarian version of Islam, but as active participants rewriting their stories through the liberating power of the memoir. The comparative approach between narrative and comic memoirs is a fruitful way of displaying similar experiences of disillusionment, loss, return, and exile through different techniques. The common thread uniting both memoirs is their zeal to reclaim Iranian women’s agency and strength over subservience and passivity.

That Other World Book

That Other World

  • Author : Azar Nafisi
  • Publisher : Yale University Press
  • Release Date : 2019-06-25
  • Genre: Biography & Autobiography
  • Pages : 374
  • ISBN 10 : 9780300159752
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The foundational text for the acclaimed international best seller Reading Lolita in Tehran “Empathetic, incisive. . . . A sweeping overview of Nabokov's major works. . . . Graceful [and] discerning.”—Kirkus Reviews 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.

Read Dangerously Book
Score: 3
From 2 Ratings

Read Dangerously

  • Author : Azar Nafisi
  • Publisher : HarperCollins
  • Release Date : 2022-03-08
  • Genre: Literary Criticism
  • Pages : 181
  • ISBN 10 : 9780062947383
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The New York Times bestselling author of Reading Lolita in Tehran 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. "[A] stunning look at the power of reading. ... Provokes and inspires at every turn." —Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Remarkable. ... Audacious." —The Progressive "Stunningly beautiful and perceptive." —Los Angeles Review of Books 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.

Anna Hibiscus Book
Score: 4
From 4 Ratings

Anna Hibiscus

  • Author : Atinuke
  • Publisher : Candlewick Press
  • Release Date : 2022-04-05
  • Genre: Juvenile Fiction
  • Pages : 113
  • ISBN 10 : 9781536226935
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From acclaimed Nigerian storyteller Atinuke, the first in a series of chapter books set in contemporary West Africa introduces a little girl who has enchanted young readers. Anna Hibiscus lives in Africa, amazing Africa, with her mother and father, her twin baby brothers (Double and Trouble), and lots of extended family in a big white house with a beautiful garden in a compound in a city. Anna is never lonely—there are always cousins to play and fight with, aunties and uncles laughing and shouting, and parents and grandparents close by. Readers will happily follow as she goes on a seaside vacation, helps plan a party for Auntie Comfort from Canada (will she remember her Nigerian ways?), learns firsthand what it’s really like to be a child selling oranges outside the gate, and longs to see sweet snow. Nigerian storyteller Atinuke’s debut book for children and its sequels, with their charming (and abundant) gray-scale drawings by Lauren Tobia, are newly published in the US by Candlewick Press, joining other celebrated Atinuke stories in captivating young readers.

Shady Hollow Book
Score: 4
From 7 Ratings

Shady Hollow

  • Author : Juneau Black
  • Publisher : Vintage
  • Release Date : 2022-01-25
  • Genre: Fiction
  • Pages : 241
  • ISBN 10 : 9780593466278
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The first book in the Shady Hollow series, in which we are introduced to the village of Shady Hollow, a place where woodland creatures live together in harmony—until a curmudgeonly toad turns up dead and the local reporter has to solve the case. Reporter Vera Vixen is a relative newcomer to Shady Hollow. The fox has a nose for news, so when she catches wind that the death might be a murder, she resolves to get to the bottom of the case, no matter where it leads. As she stirs up still waters, the fox exposes more than one mystery, and discovers that additional lives are in jeopardy. Vera finds more to this town than she ever suspected. It seems someone in the Hollow will do anything to keep her from solving the murder, and soon it will take all of Vera’s cunning and quickness to crack the case. A VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD ORIGINAL

Invitation to a Beheading Book

Invitation to a Beheading

  • Author : Vladimir Nabokov
  • Publisher : Vintage
  • Release Date : 2011-02-16
  • Genre: Fiction
  • Pages : 240
  • ISBN 10 : 9780307787354
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Like Kafka's The Castle, Invitation to a Beheading embodies a vision of a bizarre and irrational world. In an unnamed dream country, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for "gnostical turpitude," an imaginary crime that defies definition. Cincinnatus spends his last days in an absurd jail, where he is visited by chimerical jailers, an executioner who masquerades as a fellow prisoner, and by his in-laws, who lug their furniture with them into his cell. When Cincinnatus is led out to be executed, he simply wills his executioners out of existence: they disappear, along with the whole world they inhabit.

Lipstick Jihad Book
Score: 4
From 1 Ratings

Lipstick Jihad

  • Author : Azadeh Moaveni
  • Publisher : PublicAffairs
  • Release Date : 2007-03-31
  • Genre: History
  • Pages : 272
  • ISBN 10 : 9781586485498
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As far back as she can remember, Azadeh Moaveni has felt at odds with her tangled identity as an Iranian-American. In suburban America, Azadeh lived in two worlds. At home, she was the daughter of the Iranian exile community, serving tea, clinging to tradition, and dreaming of Tehran. Outside, she was a California girl who practiced yoga and listened to Madonna. For years, she ignored the tense standoff between her two cultures. But college magnified the clash between Iran and America, and after graduating, she moved to Iran as a journalist. This is the story of her search for identity, between two cultures cleaved apart by a violent history. It is also the story of Iran, a restive land lost in the twilight of its revolution. Moaveni's homecoming falls in the heady days of the country's reform movement, when young people demonstrated in the streets and shouted for the Islamic regime to end. In these tumultuous times, she struggles to build a life in a dark country, wholly unlike the luminous, saffron and turquoise-tinted Iran of her imagination. As she leads us through the drug-soaked, underground parties of Tehran, into the hedonistic lives of young people desperate for change, Moaveni paints a rare portrait of Iran's rebellious next generation. The landscape of her Tehran — ski slopes, fashion shows, malls and cafes — is populated by a cast of young people whose exuberance and despair brings the modern reality of Iran to vivid life.

Persepolis Book

Persepolis

  • Author : Marjane Satrapi
  • Publisher : Pantheon
  • Release Date : 2003-04-29
  • Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
  • Pages : 161
  • ISBN 10 : 9780375422300
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BEST SELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • Wise, funny, and heartbreaking, Persepolis is Marjane Satrapi’s acclaimed graphic memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. “A wholly original achievement.... Satrapi evokes herself and her schoolmates coming of age in a world of protests and disappearances.... A stark, shocking impact.” —The New York Times: "The 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years" In powerful black-and-white comic strip images, Satrapi tells the coming-of-age story of her life in Tehran from ages six to fourteen, years that saw the overthrow of the Shah’s regime, the triumph of the Islamic Revolution, and the devastating effects of war with Iraq. The intelligent and outspoken only child of committed Marxists and the great-granddaughter of one of Iran’s last emperors, Marjane bears witness to a childhood uniquely entwined with the history of her country. Persepolis paints an unforgettable portrait of daily life in Iran and of the bewildering contradictions between home life and public life. Marjane’s child’s-eye view of dethroned emperors, state-sanctioned whippings, and heroes of the revolution allows us to learn as she does the history of this fascinating country and of her own extraordinary family. Intensely personal, profoundly political, and wholly original, Persepolis is at once a story of growing up and a reminder of the human cost of war and political repression. It shows how we carry on, with laughter and tears, in the face of absurdity. And, finally, it introduces us to an irresistible little girl with whom we cannot help but fall in love.

Daughter of the Queen of Sheba Book
Score: 2
From 2 Ratings

Daughter of the Queen of Sheba

  • Author : Jacki Lyden
  • Publisher : HMH
  • Release Date : 1997-10-01
  • Genre: Biography & Autobiography
  • Pages : 272
  • ISBN 10 : 9780547745718
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This account of growing up with a mentally ill mother “belongs on a shelf of classic memoirs, alongside The Liars’ Club and Angela’s Ashes” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times). As an NPR correspondent, Jacki Lyden visited some dangerous war zones—but her childhood was a war zone of a different kind. Lyden’s mother suffered from what is now called bipolar disorder or manic depression. But in a small Wisconsin town in the sixties and seventies she was simply “crazy.” In her delusions, Lyden’s mother was a woman of power: Marie Antoinette or the Queen of Sheba. But in reality, she had married the nefarious local doctor, who drugged her to keep her moods in check and terrorized the children to keep them quiet. Holding their lives together was Lyden’s hardscrabble Irish grandmother, a woman who had her first child at the age of fourteen and lost her husband in a barroom brawl. In this memoir, Lyden vividly captures the seductive energy of her mother’s delusions and the effect they had on her own life. She paints a portrait of three remarkable women—mother, daughter, and grandmother—revealing their obstinate devotion to one another against all odds, and their scrappy genius for survival. “What distinguishes Daughter of the Queen of Sheba from any other book about dysfunctional parents . . . and turns this exotic memoir into compelling literature is the dreamy poetry of Lyden’s prose. In graceful imagery as original (and occasionally as highly wrought) as her mother’s costumes, Lyden—a senior correspondent for National Public Radio—loops and loops again around the central fact of her mother’s manic depression and how that illness shaped Lyden’s life growing up with two younger sisters, a scrappy Irish grandmother (whose memory she holds like ‘a cotton rag around a cut’), a father who left, and a hated stepfather.” —Entertainment Weekly

Nine Parts of Desire Book
Score: 4
From 28 Ratings

Nine Parts of Desire

  • Author : Geraldine Brooks
  • Publisher : Anchor
  • Release Date : 2010-02-24
  • Genre: Social Science
  • Pages : 272
  • ISBN 10 : 9780307434456
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INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER - Pulitzer Prize winning author presents the stories of a wide range of Muslim women in the Middle East. As an Australian American and an experienced foreign correspondent, Brooks' thoughtful analysis attempts to understand the precarious status of women in the wake of Islamic fundamentalism. "Frank, enraging, and captivating." - The New York Times Nine Parts of Desire is the story of Brooks' intrepid journey toward an understanding of the women behind the veils, and of the often contradictory political, religious, and cultural forces that shape their lives. Defying our stereotypes about the Muslim world, Brooks' acute analysis of the world's fastest growing religion deftly illustrates how Islam's holiest texts have been misused to justify repression of women, and how male pride and power have warped the original message of a once liberating faith. As a prizewinning foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Geraldine Brooks spent six years covering the Middle East through wars, insurrections, and the volcanic upheaval of resurgent fundamentalism. Yet for her, headline events were only the backdrop to a less obvious but more enduring drama: the daily life of Muslim women.