NAFISI, Azar.
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books.
New York: Random House, 2003.
$850.00
In Stock
Item Number: RRB-152442
+$500
First Edition of Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran; Inscribed by Her to Political Scientist Eliot Cohen in the Year of Publication
First edition of this acclaimed memoir of teaching forbidden works of Western literature to a secret book group of young women in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Octavo, original boards. Association copy, lengthily inscribed by the author in the year of publication on the title page, "To Eliot Cohen, whose vision and intellectual courage I have always admired so much, and whose friendship I will always cherish. Happy birthday, Azar Nafisi, April 2003." The recipient, Eliot Asher Cohen, is one of the foremost American political scientists and military strategists of his generation. He received his BA and PhD in political science from Harvard University and taught briefly at Harvard and the Naval War College before joining the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in 1990. At SAIS he holds the Robert E. Osgood Chair in Strategic Studies, founded the Strategic Studies program, and served as the ninth Dean of the school from 2019 to 2021. He also served as Counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice from 2007 to 2009. His books include Supreme Command (2002), Conquered into Liberty (2011), and The Big Stick (2017). His institutional connection to Azar Nafisi is a meaningful one. Nafisi, the Iranian-American author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, directed the Dialogue Project at the Foreign Policy Institute at SAIS, making Cohen and Nafisi longtime colleagues at the same institution. Near fine in a near fine dust jacket.
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books recounts the years Azar Nafisi spent teaching English literature in the Islamic Republic of Iran, culminating in a secret weekly class in which seven of her female students gathered in her living room to read and discuss forbidden Western novels by Nabokov, Fitzgerald, James, and Austen. Interweaving memoir, literary criticism, and a portrait of life under a repressive theocracy, the book became a publishing phenomenon, spending more than a hundred weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and being translated into more than thirty languages. Azar Nafisi is an Iranian American writer and professor who taught at the University of Tehran before being expelled for refusing to wear the veil, and who later joined the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books.
$850.00
In Stock