Viv Groskop interviews author Azar Nafisi about her book, Reading Lolita in Tehran, which chronicles her experience teaching controversial works in Tehran. Nafisi also discusses her motivation to write her most recent book, The Republic of Imagination, which argues that literature promotes a “democratic way of living”:
Fiction confronts a great many things that we cannot fully confront in real life. Fiction is the ability to be multi-vocal and to speak through the mind and the heart of even the villain. In doing that, it forces us to face the pain of being human and being transient. It’s what Nabokov talks about: “The conclusive evidence of having lived.”
