
In "Read Dangerously," Azar Nafisi challenges us to embrace literature as resistance in polarized times. Shortlisted for the Christian Gauss Award, this timely manifesto arrives as book banning surges nationwide. What dangerous ideas might you discover between forbidden pages?
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Picture a young girl in Tehran, sitting cross-legged on her bedroom floor as her father reads aloud from ancient Persian epics and French novellas. These weren't just bedtime stories-they were survival kits. In a country sliding toward revolution, where certainty would soon replace nuance and ideology would trump imagination, these tales became something more precious than any physical refuge. They became a portable homeland, one that could never be confiscated at a checkpoint or burned in a public square. This is what literature does in its most radical form: it gives us a place to stand when the ground beneath our feet turns hostile. In our current moment-when both Iran's theocracy and America's polarization threaten to reduce human complexity to binary choices-we need this refuge more than ever. Reading dangerously means engaging with opposition, discovering ourselves by knowing our enemies, and resisting the tyrant within us before we can effectively fight the tyrant outside.