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Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times
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About This 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. What is the role of literature in an era when the president wages 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 resistance literature, 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, Baba, 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.
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Reviews
"But she still hits hard ..."
"With sensitivity and intelligence, it offers a new canon for the tyrannies of the present and the dystopian possibilities of the future."
"Reading Dangerously is a political writer's brilliant attempt to understand historical and political events, as well as human nature, such that one feels her struggle to offer honest, well considered suppositions."
"Not all the writers are as well known as Plato, Morrison, Rushdie, and Hurston...Her assessment of these works feels even more heartfelt than the other letters."
"Nafisi is a triple survivor: of child abuse, of the patriarchal manipulations of the Islamic regime, and of her birth family's unbearable chaos, which left her vulnerable to despair."
"Nafisi's prose is razor-sharp, and her analysis lands on a hopeful note ..."
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