Azar Nafisi, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, is here to tell us about her new book: The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books.
Ten years ago, Nafisi wrote Reading Lolita in Tehran, which told the story of how she taught American literature to eager students in Iran, revealing how fiction can be a liberating force in a totalitarian society.
Blending memoir with close readings of four of her favorite novels—Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and James Baldwin’s Another Country—Azar describes how she first discovered America and its fictional landscape as a young girl in Tehran and reminds us of the crucial role that literature played in the lives of the founding fathers.