For a love of books

A Toronto Star Article covers Azar Nafisi, ran a clandestine reading group in her Tehran apartment for seven young women who had been her best students.
In her recently published memoir, Reading Lolita In Tehran (Random House), Nafisi writes that Mitra, a student in her secret class, once asked her, “Why is it that stories like Lolita and Madame Bovary — stories that are so sad, so tragic — make us happy? If we were to write about our lives here in the Islamic Republic of Iran, should we make our readers happy?”