Part memoir, part lit crit, Reading Lolita in Tehran recounts Nafisi’s years teaching clandestine literature seminars to a small group of women in post-revolutionary Iran.

The book is not simply about censorship but about the stakes of reading itself. The novelists the group reads — Nabokov, Fitzgerald, James, Austen — are a way of providing a counterpoint to their oppression, reclaiming their own private interiority from ideological control.

Nafisi frames literature as a space where ambiguity survives regimes that demand purity and obedience. It's an intellectual memoir that treats books as instruments of resistance, though it has also drawn debate for the way it stages Iran and the West in tension. A work that continues to circulate widely in classrooms and reading groups.

Perfection for bookclub.