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More on Books & Critics from The Atlantic Monthly.

Also by Elizabeth Wasserman:

"Logging On For Love" (February 7, 2006)
The author of this month's cover story talks about love and the new research that's being produced by Internet matchmaking services.

"Rebels Without a Cause" (March 9, 2005)
Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, the authors of Nation of Rebels, on how the myth of a counterculture derailed the political left.

"Islam’s Interpreter" (April 29, 2004)
Bernard Lewis talks about his seventy years spent studying the Middle East—and his thoughts on the region's future.

Previously in Interviews:

"Bronx Story" (April 24, 2003)
A conversation with Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, whose new book, Random Family, chronicles the struggles of an impoverished extended family in New York.

"The Nature of Inheritance" (April 11, 2003)
A conversation with Cristina García, whose new novel, Monkey Hunting, explores Cuban identity, immigrant life, and the way family history evolves.

"Caught Between Places" (April 2, 2003)
A conversation with John Murray, a doctor-turned-writer whose characters are often searching to reconcile their new lives with the ones they've left behind.

"The Real Islam" (March 20, 2003)
In The Two Faces of Islam the journalist Stephen Schwartz argues that in order to appreciate the pluralist, tolerant side of Islam, we must confront its ugly, extremist side.

"A More Perfect Union" (January 14, 2003)
Ted Halstead, the founder and CEO of the New America Foundation, argues that the time has come for Americans to devise a new social contract.

"Language Makes the Senses One" (January 8, 2003)
Peter Davison talks with the poet Stanley Plumly, who believes that "language, at its best, is not easy"

Atlantic Unbound | May 7, 2003

Interviews

The Fiction of Life

Azar Nafisi, the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, on the dangers of using religion as an ideology, and the freedoms that literature can bring

.....

Reading Lolita in Tehran

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
by Azar Nafisi
Random House
288 pages, $23.95

n 1979, Azar Nafisi returned to her native Iran after a seventeen-year absence. From the moment she stepped off the plane, she found herself in a place that was dark and unfamiliar. The cheerful and cosmopolitan Tehran airport that she remembered from her youth, with its terraced restaurant and stylishly dressed women, now seemed barren except for giant posters of the ayatollahs tagged with menacing slogans in black and red: "DEATH TO AMERICA! DOWN WITH IMPERIALISM & ZIONISM! AMERICA IS OUR NUMBER-ONE ENEMY!" As a customs official searched her bags, he picked up her books—most of them modern American novels—with particular disdain, as though handling dirty laundry. "But he did not confiscate them—not then," Nafisi recalls forebodingly in her memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran. "That would come sometime later."

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Discuss this article in Post & Riposte.

More Interviews in Atlantic Unbound.