Showing results for title "The Republic of Imagination", by author "Azar Nafisi" in History

Blending memoir and polemic with close readings of her favorite novels, she describes the unexpected journey that led her to become an American citizen after first dreaming of America as a young girl in Tehran and coming to know the country through its fiction. She urges us to rediscover the America of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and challenges us to be truer to the words and spirit of the Founding Fathers, who understood that their democratic experiment would never thrive or survive unless they could foster a democratic imagination.

Taking her cue from a challenge thrown to her at a reading, Nafisi energetically responds to those who say fiction has nothing to teach us today. Blending memoir and polemic with close readings of her favourite novels, 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.