The republic of imagination
Subtitle: the case for fiction
By: Azar Nafisi ; illustrations by Peter Sis
Contributors: Sís, Peter, 1949- illustrator
Publisher: William Heinemann
Published: 2014
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 338
ISBN-13: 9780434022151; 9780434022168; 9781448149032
Subjects: National characteristics in literature; Iranian American women; Literatur; Books and reading; Appreciation; University of South Alabama; Heart is a lonely hunter (McCullers, Carson); Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain, Mark); American fiction; Babbitt (Lewis, Sinclair); English teachers; Biography
Description: Ten years ago, Azar Nafisi electrified readers with her million-copy bestseller, Reading Lolita in Tehran, which told the story of how, against the backdrop of morality squads and executions, she taught The Great Gatsby and other classics to her eager students in Iran. In this exhilarating followup, Nafisi has written the book her fans have been waiting for: an impassioned, beguiling, and utterly original tribute to the vital importance of fiction in a democratic society. What Reading Lolita in Tehran was for Iran, The Republic of Imagination is for America. Taking her cue from a challenge thrown to her in Seattle, where a skeptical reader told her that Americans don't care about books the way they did back in Iran, she energetically responds to those who say fiction has nothing to teach us. Blending memoir and polemic with close readings of her favourite American novels - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Babbitt, and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, among others - she invites us to join her as citizens of her Republic of Imagination, a country where the villains are conformity and orthodoxy and the only passport to entry is a free mind and a willingness to dream.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references.