Reading Lolita in Teheran is an autobiographical novel. For two years (1979-1981) the author, Azar Nafisi, professor of Anglo-American literature in Teheran, every Thursday morning gathers, her pupils, seven young women, only women, in living room of her home, to read forbidden fiction authors: Nabokov, James, Austen, Fitzgerald. The meetings are clan-destine because, under the Ayatollah Khomeini’s regime, those books are considered the mir-ror of blasphemous western culture.
Keywords: Censorship, coercion, literature, imagination, freedom.