Reading Lolita in Tehran - Azar Nafisi

#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 who must meet in secret to explore the forbidden fiction of the West. It is at once a celebration of the power of the novel and a cry of outrage at the reality in which these women are trapped. The ayatollahs don' t know it, but Nafisi is one of the heroes of the Islamic Republic."-Geraldine Brooks, author of Nine Parts of Desire