Reading Lolita in TehranReading Lolita in Tehran

A New York Times Bestseller. We all have dreams - things we fantasize about doing and generally never get around to. For two years before she left Iran in 1997, Nafisi gathered seven young women at her house every Thursday morning to read and discuss forbidden works of Western literature. They were shy and uncomfortable at first, unaccustomed to being asked to speak their minds, but soon they began to speak more freely. Not only about the novels they were reading but also about themselves, their dreams and disappointments. Azar Nafisi's luminous tale offers a fascinating portrait of the Iran-Iraq war viewed from Tehran and gives us a rare glimpse, from the inside of women's lives in revolutionary Iran.