CBC Books | | Posted: May 11, 2022 1:54 PM | Last Updated: May 11, 2022
Azar Nafisi
Image | Read Dangerously
(Dey Street 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. (From Dey Street Books)
Azar Nafisi is an academic and author based in Washington, D.C. Her work includes the New York Times bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran, as well as Things I've Been Silent About, The Republic of Imagination and That Other World.
Interviews with Azar Nafisi
Media Audio | The Sunday Magazine : Azar Nafisi on the power of literature to fight authoritarianism
Caption: Between international conflicts, political division, misinformation, rising anti-democratic forces and a pandemic, it can be easy to feel overwhelmed by the latest news headlines. But the antidote to that hopelessness may be as close as your bookshelf or local library. So says Azar Nafisi, the acclaimed author who's perhaps best-known for her memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran. Her new collection of essays Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times is a reading list of sorts, written in the form of letters to her late father about the work of writers from Plato and Salman Rushdie, to Margaret Atwood and Ta-Nehisi Coates. Nafisi tells Piya Chattopadhyay why she turned to them for inspiration, as she struggled to make sense of the rise of authoritarianism around the world.
Media Audio | The Current : Writer Azar Nafisi argues fiction is democracy's oxygen - July 20, 2015
Caption: It is not for nothing that tyrants burn books and imprison authors. Azar Nafisi says totalitarian regimes fear the power of ideas and nowhere are ideas more forceful than in fiction. Today, the writer shares how imagination and ideas defies limitations.