Azar Nafisi on the Power of ‘Reading Dangerously’

Writer Azar Nafisi says totalitarian regimes pay “too much attention to poets and writers, harassing, jailing and even killing them,” but in America the problem is too little attention, silencing them through “indifference and negligence.” Nafisi’s new book, “Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times,” is written as a series of letters to her late father discussing the writers she turns to when grappling with oppression and injustice, including Salman Rushdie, Plato, Zora Neale Hurston, Ray Bradbury and Margaret Atwood. “I am not talking about literature of resistance but literature as resistance,” she writes, the ways “literature and art resist seats of power – not only that of kings and tyrants, but the tyrant within us as well.”

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