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Reading Lolita in Tehran
- A Memoir in Books
- Narrated by: Azar Nafisi
- Length: 17 hrs and 36 mins
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Publisher's summary
Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the girls in Azar Nafisi's living room risked removing their veils and immersed themselves in the worlds of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov. In this extraordinary memoir, their stories become intertwined with the ones they are reading. Reading Lolita in Tehran is a remarkable exploration of resilience in the face of tyranny and a celebration of the liberating power of literature.
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All genres considered, the memoir is among the most difficult and complex for a writer to pull off. After all, giving voice to your own lived experience and recounting deeply painful or uncomfortable memories in a way that still engages and entertains is a remarkable feat. These autobiographies, often narrated by the authors themselves, shine with raw, unfiltered emotion sure to resonate with any listener. But don't just take our word for it—queue up any one of these listens, and you'll hear exactly what we mean.
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- Narrated by: Antonia Beamish
- Length: 11 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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When Stalin came into power in 1924, the Communist government began persecuting dissident writers. Though Stalin spared the life of Boris Pasternak - whose novel in progress, Doctor Zhivago, was suspected of being anti-Soviet - he persecuted Boris' mistress, typist, and literary muse, Olga Ivinskaya. Boris' affair with Olga devastated the straitlaced Pasternaks, and they were keen to disavow Olga's role in Boris' writing process.
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A wonderfully enjoyable read
- By gran 80 on 03-15-17
By: Anna Pasternak
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The Pendulum
- A Granddaughter's Search for Her Family's Forbidden Nazi Past
- By: Julie Lindahl
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 9 hrs
- Unabridged
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This powerful memoir traces Brazilian-born American Julie Lindahl's journey to uncover her grandparents' role in the Third Reich, as she is driven to understand how and why they became members of Hitler's elite, the SS. Out of the unbearable heart of the story - the unclaimed guilt that devours a family through the generations - emerges an unflinching will to learn the truth.
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Exceptional
- By Jean on 01-14-19
By: Julie Lindahl
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Distant Star
- By: Roberto Bolano
- Narrated by: Walter Krochmal
- Length: 4 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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A chilling novel about the nightmare of a corrupt and brutal dictatorship. The star of Roberto Bolano's hair-raising novel Distant Star is Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, an air force pilot who exploits the 1973 coup to launch his own version of the New Chilean Poetry, a multimedia enterprise involving sky-writing, poetry, torture, and photo exhibitions. For our unnamed narrator, who first encounters this "star" in a college poetry workshop, Ruiz-Tagle becomes the silent hand behind every evil act in the darkness of Pinochet's regime.
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Omg
- By Sierra on 08-03-16
By: Roberto Bolano
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In the Light of What We Know
- By: Zia Haider Rahman
- Narrated by: Ralph Lister
- Length: 21 hrs and 14 mins
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One September morning in 2008, an investment banker approaching forty, his career in collapse and his marriage unraveling, receives a surprise visitor at his West London townhouse. In the disheveled figure of a South Asian male carrying a backpack the banker recognizes a long-lost friend, a mathematics prodigy who disappeared years earlier under mysterious circumstances. The friend has resurfaced to make a confession of unsettling power.
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dreadful
- By sam on 06-05-15
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The Museum of Innocence
- By: Orhan Pamuk, Maureen Freely (translator)
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 20 hrs and 33 mins
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Kemal, scion of one of the city's wealthiest families, is about to become engaged to Sibel, daughter of another prominent family, when he encounters Füsun, a beautiful shopgirl and a distant relation. Once the long-lost cousins violate the code of virginity, a rift begins to open between Kemal and the world of the Westernized Istanbul bourgeosie - a world, as he lovingly describes it, with opulent parties and clubs, society gossip, picnics, and mansions on the Bosphorus, infused with the melancholy of decay.
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one of the very best I've ever heard
- By Rebecca Lindroos on 03-06-10
By: Orhan Pamuk, and others
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The Zahir
- By: Paulo Coelho
- Narrated by: Derek Jacobi, Emilia Fox
- Length: 5 hrs and 16 mins
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It begins with a glimpse or a passing thought. It ends in obsession. One day a renowned author discovers that his wife, a war correspondent, has disappeared leaving no trace. Though time brings more success and new love, he remains mystified - and increasingly fascinated - by her absence. Was she kidnapped, blackmailed, or simply bored with their marriage? The unrest she causes is as strong as the attraction she exerts.
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Beautiful and deep read!
- By Top 1% Buyer on 09-13-15
By: Paulo Coelho
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Accident of Birth
- By: Heather Neff
- Narrated by: Myra Lucretia Taylor
- Length: 13 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Reba Freeman has loved two men in her life. Her current husband, Carl, has supported her through their 20-year marriage and given her all the material wealth a suburban wife could hope for. Reba is comfortable, if not necessarily content, in her life with Carl and their blossoming teenage daughter, Marisa, until she learns that her first love and first husband, Joseph Thomas, has been detained by the World Court of Human Rights.
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Good Listen
- By Tricia on 02-24-08
By: Heather Neff
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Marina and Lee
- The Tormented Love and Fatal Obsession Behind Lee Harvey Oswald's Assassination of John F. Kennedy
- By: Priscilla Johnson McMillan
- Narrated by: R.C. Bray, Joseph Finder
- Length: 24 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Marina and Lee is one of the best and truest audiobooks about the Kennedy assassination. Priscilla Johnson McMillan came to the story with a unique knowledge of the two main characters. In the 1950s she knew Kennedy well for a time when he was hospitalized with Addison's disease. She talked to him frequently, brought him books, knew his wife, and formed a strong opinion of the sort of man he was. What is astonishing is that she also knew Lee Harvey Oswald.
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Now I know why he did it
- By Rodd on 06-09-14
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Stalin's Daughter
- The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva
- By: Rosemary Sullivan
- Narrated by: Karen Cass
- Length: 19 hrs and 43 mins
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The award-winning author of Villa Air-Bel returns with a painstakingly researched, revelatory biography of Svetlana Stalin, a woman fated to live her life in the shadow of one of history's most monstrous dictators—her father, Josef Stalin. Born in the early years of the Soviet Union, Svetlana Stalin spent her youth inside the walls of the Kremlin. Communist Party privilege protected her from the mass starvation and purges that haunted Russia, but she did not escape tragedy—the loss of everyone she loved, including her mother, two brothers, aunts and uncles, and a lover twice her age, deliberately exiled to Siberia by her father.
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Insightful and thoroughly researched
- By Jean on 06-16-15
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The Golden Notebook
- By: Doris Lessing
- Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson
- Length: 27 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Author Anna Wulf attempts to overcome writer’s block by writing a comprehensive "golden notebook" that draws together the preoccupations of her life, each of which is examined in a different notebook. Anna’s struggle to unify the various strands of her life – emotional, political, and professional – amasses into a fascinating encyclopaedia of female experience in the ‘50s.
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Transcendent narration of a masterpiece.
- By @vmarinelli on 07-03-12
By: Doris Lessing
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We should have known the end was near. So begins Imbolo Mbue’s powerful second novel, How Beautiful We Were. Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, it tells of a people living in fear amid environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of cleanup and financial reparations to the villagers are made - and ignored. The country’s government, led by a brazen dictator, exists to serve its own interests.
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As relevant as it is heart-wrenching
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What listeners say about Reading Lolita in Tehran
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- S. Lundquist
- 11-07-18
Speed it up
I was so excited to listen to this book. I love books about women in other cultures. I kept seeing this title come up and was sure I’d like it, but I found this book quite slow— both the story and the performance.
I enjoyed the author’s accent and vocal quality, but she tends to say things without emotion. It made listening a little bit frustrating (and occasionally confusing). She doesn’t vary her delivery very much — she was reading in a flat voice and then said, “she said vehemently.” No vehemence. No fervor. It’s bad enough that I think it negatively affected the whole experience. I really wanted to love the book! When I realized I could listen to the book at 1.25x speed, the experience really improved.
Another issue: I don’t necessarily care about every one of the novels they’re reading. If you’re not a MAJOR classic author fan, it has some dull moments. Perhaps if I’d read every novel the author references I would have enjoyed it more? It was interesting to hear people react to the books from their point of view and try to apply their morals to the novel.
The women in the book study group are interesting, but the author doesn’t flesh them out enough for you. She’s too busy ruminating. It’s more navel-gazing than I was really prepared for — she has whole passages where she’s questioning whether or not her memory is really what happened or if she’s tainting it. And while I understand she wanted to work through that... it’s boring. Yes, memory isn’t a stack of DVDs you can sort through and push play on to relive. They’re fluid. You impart your own bias. This is not a history book, and since she fills page after page with her own opinions in almost a dairy-like writing style anyway, what does it really matter? I wanted an interesting story about women living in Tehran, forming community and escaping through books... and it’s there, but it’s muddy.
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10 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Peggy McDermott
- 06-15-20
Very Literary
This is a very long book , full of analysis of characters and motives for the novels that were discuss by a group of Iranian women. It was interesting for the most part. But at times I found it tedious. I have read most of Jane Austen novels. And found them lovely and entertaining. One thing that it did is peak my interest in maybe reading some Henry James - Daisy Miller.
I read for fun and entertainment so it may be just not my cup of tea .
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- Alexis
- 10-10-18
The Handmaid's Tale is Real
LOVED this book, what an amazing look into the Iranian revolution.... and hopefully not America's future.
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- Stephen Werk
- 05-27-18
Excellent book
When I started reading this book, I found it only moderately interesting, but as I read on I became more and more engrossed. It captured very well what it is like to live in a totalitarian country like Iran. The depiction of how these young woman lived in such a place was well described. I also enjoyed the author’s take on literature I’ve read and literature I haven’t yet read but am now inspired to read. The narration by the author was excellent. I highly recommend this audio book.
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7 people found this helpful
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- Kelsey Varahachaikol
- 05-04-18
A treat for literature people
A wonderful work for literary people! although, "James" is a bit slow. pay attention and enjoy!!
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5 people found this helpful
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- GigiSxm
- 09-12-19
Not what I expected
Not what I expected but in a good way.
I expected a more in-depth study of Lolita.
I expected a more in-depth vie of daily live in the revolution from a woman’s perspective.
What I got a bibliophile’s dream a long list of books I’d like to visit or revisit in the context of this book.
What i got was a the perspective of the revolution from an academic and not that of the everyday woman or the active revolutionary.
All in all a good read.
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- Jason Baumbach
- 09-21-21
More James and the Iranian Revolution than Lolita
This is a worthwhile memoir of a female professor living through the revolution and teaching Western literature in Tehran.
Seeing such literature through the eyes of Iranians is fascinating to me as an American.
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- Amazon Customer
- 12-18-20
Fabulous
This is a great read, sparked more of my interest than anticipated. I felt I was there throughout my read. Excellent.
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- Andrea
- 10-04-20
Read by the author!!!!
I absolutely loved hearing the book with the author’s voice. I felt almost like I was sitting with her having a coffee. This book is very insightful as to how people lived the change of the regime and specially women.
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- Dave R.
- 01-18-23
Excellent Memoir
This was very long, but I enjoyed it a lot. I don’t usually read memoirs unless it’s for a book club, but this one kept me interested until the very end.
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