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Books Like Reading Lolita in Tehran
Best books to read after Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
If Reading Lolita in Tehran moved you — the seven women reading Nabokov and Austen in secret, Nafisi's argument that literature sustains interior freedom when exterior freedom has been suppressed, the portrait of Tehran under the Islamic Republic — these eight books share its engagement with reading as resistance, its Iranian subject, or its investigation of how women survive and maintain their inner lives under authoritarian regimes.
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Persepolis
by Marjane Satrapi
Marjane Satrapi growing up in Tehran during and after the Islamic Revolution — Satrapi's graphic memoir is the most direct companion to Reading Lolita in Tehran: the same Islamic Republic, the same portrait of educated secular women and girls trying to maintain their inner lives under a regime that wants to define and control them; where Nafisi uses Western novels as the medium of her students' resistance, Satrapi uses graphic art and her own childhood memories as the medium of hers
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In the Time of the Butterflies
by Julia Alvarez
The four Mirabal sisters under the Trujillo dictatorship — Alvarez's novel shares Reading Lolita in Tehran's portrait of women who find ways to resist and maintain their identities under authoritarian regimes; where Nafisi's women use literature as the medium of their resistance, Alvarez's Mirabal sisters use political action; both works are organized around the question of what women do when the public world has decided that their inner lives don't matter
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A Thousand Splendid Suns
by Khaled Hosseini
Mariam and Laila, two Afghan women sharing a husband in Kabul through the Taliban — Hosseini's second novel shares Reading Lolita in Tehran's portrait of women's lives under a fundamentalist regime that treats women's bodies as the site of political control; where Nafisi's women are educated intellectuals who use literature as their private resistance, Hosseini's women find their resistance in friendship and in their commitment to each other
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The Handmaid's Tale
by Margaret Atwood
Offred surviving in the theocratic Republic of Gilead — Atwood's dystopian novel is the Western literary companion to Reading Lolita in Tehran's Iranian portrait: both works are organized around what happens to women's inner lives when an authoritarian regime defines them entirely in terms of their reproductive and domestic function; Nafisi and her students read The Handmaid's Tale in Tehran as a work of realism rather than science fiction, recognizing their own situation in Atwood's imagined one
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The Buried Giant
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Axl and Beatrice, an elderly couple in post-Arthurian England, traveling through a land shrouded in a mist of forgetting — Ishiguro's novel shares Reading Lolita in Tehran's investigation of what memory and forgetting mean for communities that have survived historical catastrophe; where Nafisi uses literature as the vehicle for preserving memory against a regime that would erase it, Ishiguro asks whether forgetting might sometimes be what allows a community to survive its own violence
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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
by Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou's memoir about her childhood in Stamps, Arkansas — the African-American companion to Reading Lolita in Tehran in its portrait of reading and literature as forms of survival and resistance; where Nafisi's students read in secret because the regime has declared certain books dangerous, Angelou reads because books give her access to a world beyond the racism that constrains her; both works are organized around the transformative power of literature for people who are defined by others as outside the literary tradition
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The Diary of a Young Girl
by Anne Frank
Anne Frank's diary of her family's hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam — the canonical companion to Reading Lolita in Tehran in its portrait of a young woman maintaining her interior life under extreme external suppression; where Nafisi's students read novels to sustain their inner freedom, Anne Frank writes her diary; both works center on the specific power of literature and writing as forms of private selfhood when the public world has denied that selfhood
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Educated
by Tara Westover
Tara Westover's memoir about educating herself out of a survivalist Idaho family — the nonfiction companion to Reading Lolita in Tehran in its portrait of a young woman whose access to education and literature transforms her understanding of herself and the world she came from; where Nafisi's transformation is from a secular Iranian woman under the Islamic Republic, Westover's is from an American girl raised in a fundamentalist community; both memoirs are organized around what education — and specifically reading — makes possible
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