Books like Reading Lolita in Tehran
Azar Nafisi, a literature professor forced out of her university in the Islamic Republic, gathers seven of her best women students at her house every Thursday to read forbidden Western novels.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Reading Lolita in Tehran
A Tale of Love and Darkness
Amos Oz's memoir of growing up in Jerusalem in the 1940s and 50s, the only child of bookish European Jews, and of the loss of his mother when he was twelve.
Less Than One
Brodsky's essays on growing up in postwar Leningrad, on his parents, and on the poets he loved, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Auden and Cavafy among them.
The Return
Hisham Matar goes back to Libya after Qaddafi's fall, more than thirty years after his family left, to find out what happened to his father, a dissident who disappeared into a Tripoli prison.
Native Realm
Miłosz's autobiography of his education, from a childhood in Lithuania through the war in Warsaw to his defection, as a search for a European identity.
Istanbul: Memories and the City
Pamuk's memoir of growing up in Istanbul in the 1950s and 60s, of his family, and of the melancholy of the city, which Turks call hüzün.
Autobiographies
Yeats's own account of his childhood in Sligo and London, his youth among the artists and occultists of the 1890s, and the Irish literary revival.
The Year of Magical Thinking
After her husband's sudden death and her daughter's hospitalisation, Didion keeps a forensic record of what magical thinking her grief conjures and what it refuses to.
The Tongue Set Free
Canetti remembers his childhood from 1905 to 1921, in a Sephardic Jewish family in Bulgaria, Manchester, Vienna and Zurich, and the mother who taught him German.
Wild Swans
Three generations of women in China, Jung Chang's grandmother, a warlord's concubine, her mother, a Communist official, and Chang herself, a Red Guard, through the twentieth century.
An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic
A classicist's elderly father audits his seminar on the Odyssey, and together they take a Mediterranean cruise retracing Odysseus's route.
The World of Yesterday
Zweig's memoir of the lost cosmopolitan Europe of his youth, written in Brazilian exile and sent to his publisher on the day he and his wife took their lives.
An Angel at My Table
Janet Frame's autobiography, from a poor childhood in Oamaru through eight years in mental hospitals to her escape into writing and to Europe.