‘Reading Lolita in Tehran’ author reads works at the Main Library on Thursday, November 9, 2006 at 6 p.m.
Azar Nafisi, best known as the author of the national bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, comes to the Library on Nov. 9. From 1995 to 1997, amidst the Islamic revolution in Iran, Nafisi met with seven female students every Thursday morning to secretly discuss Western literature. Reading Lolita in Tehran is the memoir of that experience, where the conversations ranged from Jane Austen to Henry James to Vladimir Nabokov. Earning high acclaim and an enthusiastic readership, Reading Lolita in Tehran is an incisive exploration of the transformative powers of fiction in a world of tyranny.
Reading Lolita in Tehran has been translated into 32 languages and has won numerous literary awards, including the 2004 Nonfiction Book of the Year Award from Booksense.
Nafisi attended the University of Oklahoma and later Oxford University and taught literature at three Iranian universities, including the University of Tehran, from which she was expelled for refusing to wear a veil. Nafisi left Iran for the U.S. with her family in 1997. She is the author of Anti-Terra: A Critical Study of Vladimir Nabokov’s Novels and has also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. She is currently a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC, where she teaches courses on the relation between culture and politics.
Nafisi will read from and discuss Reading Lolita in Tehran and her current work at 6 p.m. in the Koret Auditorium at the Main Library on Thursday, November 9, 2006. A book sale and author signing will follow.
This event is part of Community Conversations: Exploring Issues of Civic Responsibility, a series of community-wide dialogues across the U.S. sponsored by Facing History and Ourselves and funded by a grant from the Allstate Foundation. Facing History and Ourselves is an international educational and professional development organization. For more information, visit www.facinghistory.org.
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