Read Dangerously

The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times

Azar Nafisi

• Publisher: Dey Street Books
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780062947383
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Political Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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)

"Remarkable.... Audacious." — The Progressive

"Stunningly beautiful and perceptive." — Los Angeles Review of 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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• Introduction
• The First Letter: Rushdie, Plato, Bradbury
• The Second Letter: Hurston, Morrison
• The Third Letter: Grossman, Ackerman, Khoury
• The Fourth Letter: Atwood
• The Fifth Letter: Baldwin, Coates
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix: My Father’s Letter to Lyndon B. Johnson
• Books Referenced
• About the Author
• Also by Azar Nafisi
• Copyright
• About the Publisher