Books & Books, Miami Book Fair and Independent Bookstores across the U.S. present…

A Virtual Evening with

Azar Nafisi

In Conversation with Jacki Lyden

Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times

(Day Street Books, $26.99)

Saturday, March 19, 7 PM ET  | Via Zoom

GET TICKETS HERE

About the Book:

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)

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.

About the Author:

AZAR NAFISI is the author of the multi-award-winning New York Times bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran, New York Times bestseller Things I’ve Been Silent About, and The Republic of the Imagination. She has taught literature at universities in Iran and in the United States, was a Centennial Fellow at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service, and was the director of The Dialogue Project and Cultural Conversations at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Publications that she has written for include the New York Times, The New Yorker, the Washington Post, the New Republic, The Guardian, and the Wall Street Journal. Nafisi has lectured extensively on the political implications of literature and culture, as well as the human rights of the Iranian women and girls and the important role they play in the process of change for pluralism and an open society in Iran. She has been consulted on issues related to Iran and human rights both by the policy makers and various human rights organizations in the US and elsewhere. She lives in Washington, D.C.

About the Moderator:

JACKI LYDEN is an American journalist and author of the memoir, Daughter of the Queen of Sheba (1999). In 1979, Lyden joined National Public Radio as a freelance reporter in the Chicago bureau. By 1989, Lyden was stationed in London, covering The Troubles in Northern Ireland. She covered the Gulf War from the Middle East. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, she continued to serve as a foreign correspondent for NPR. Lyden, then living in Brooklyn, was NPR’s first correspondent on the air from New York during the September 11 attacks and reported from “Ground Zero”. In late 2001, she served as a foreign correspondent in Afghanistan. As a regular substitute host for Weekend All Things Considered and other shows, like Weekend Edition, she interviewed numerous poets, authors, filmmakers. She and the late John McChesney produced “Anatomy of a Shooting” in 2006, about the accidental killing of her Iraqi translator, Yasser Salihee, by an American soldier.