Reading Fiction As an Act of Resistance: A Conversation with Azar Nafisi
We need fiction because fiction does not polarize. Fiction is based on understanding over judgment.
...moreBecome a Rumpus Member
Join NOW!We need fiction because fiction does not polarize. Fiction is based on understanding over judgment.
...moreI’m a small blue dot living in a blood-red corner of a red state, so I’ve grown accustomed to hearing right wing talking points. I don’t like them, but they surface as regularly in my southwest Florida town as white egrets on the highway and dolphins in the Gulf. Talking points at the grocery store, […]
...moreWho are you?’ Isn’t this what every book asks of us as we chase its characters, trying to find out what they are reluctant to reveal? Is it not also the one essential thing we ask ourselves as human beings, as we struggle to make the choices that will define us? I can describe myself […]
...moreViv 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. […]
...moreAzar Nafisi‘s first book, Reading Lolita in Tehran, chronicles an underground book club reading Western Classics under the oppressive Islamic government of Tehran (it subsequently became a favorite book-club book State-side as it climbed The New York Times Bestseller List). Things I’ve Been Silent About, her second book, examines her family life, particularly her mother’s […]
...more