This is the story of Azar Nafisi's dream and of the nightmare that made it come true. 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 all former students whom she had taught at university. They were unaccustomed to being asked to speak their minds, but soon they began to open up and to speak more freely, not only about...

Azar Nafisi, author of the international bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran, now gives readers a stunning personal story of growing up in a family in Iran, moving memories of her life lived in thrall to a powerful and difficult mother, against the background of Iran during a time of revolution and change.

I started making a list in my diary entitled “Things I Have Been Silent About.” Under it I wrote: “Falling in Love in Tehran. Going to Parties in Tehran. Watching the Marx Brothers in Tehran. Reading Lolita in Tehran.” I wrote about repressive laws and executions, about public and political abominations. Eventually I drifted into writing about private betrayals, implicating myself and those close to me in ways I had...

The definitive translation by Dick Davis of the great national epic of Iran - now revised and expanded to be the most complete English-language edition. The translator has revised and expanded his acclaimed translation of Ferdowsi's masterpiece, adding more than seventy pages of newly-translated text. Davis's combination of prose and verse allows the poetry of the 'Shahnameh' to sing its own tales directly, interspersed sparingly with clearly marked...

Tolstoy heard the tales that grew up around the warrior-hero Hadji Murad and wrote this sweeping tale that takes up the viewpoints of all major characters in a gripping first-person narrative. This edition includes newly commissioned end notes. Maps.

"What inspires you? That's the simple, but profound question more than forty renowned authors answer in LIGHT THE DARK. Each author picks a favorite passage--from a novel, a song, a poem--to reveal what gets them started and keeps them going doing the creative work they love. From there, incredible stories of life changing encounters with art emerge, like how sneaking a volume of Stephen King stories into his job as a night security guard helped Khaled...

"Founded by Odile Hellier in 1982, The Village Voice Bookshop in Paris was a hub for anglophone literary life and a meeting place for French, American and English literati for over three decades. Hellier's collective memoir brings to life authors, publishers, and friends of the bookshop, and it narrates some of the most important reflections and debates of 20th century literary history. She has mined decades of archival footage to present anecdotes...