Лучшие книги Азар Нафиси

Выдающийся документальный роман, заслуженно получивший мировую популярность. Книга о том, как политика вторгается в личную жизнь человека и о жажде свободы, которую невозможно уничтожить. Правдивая история, наполненная поразительными деталями, - взгляд изнутри на существование в стране-изгое. Азар Нафиси, дочь мэра Тегерана, получившая образование в Америке,…

Красочные, полные запоминающихся деталей мемуары Азар Нафиси, дочери мэра Тегерана, рисуют драматичную историю одной семьи на фоне политических потрясений в Иране. Отец Нафиси, блестящий политик, оказывается в тюрьме, а через какое-то время после освобождения уходит из семьи. Мать, с которой у Нафиси складываются крайне непростые отношения, избирается в парламент…

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.

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.