That Other World; Nabokov and the Puzzle of Exile

New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. Advanced Uncorrected Page Proof Not for Resale. Wraps. Very good. xxx, [2], 341, [3] pages. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Notes translated by Dorna Khazeni. One sheet of publisher's ephemera laid in. Cover has slight wear and soiling. Azar Nafisi (born 1948) is an Iranian-American writer and professor of English literature. Born in Tehran, Iran, she has resided in the United States since 1997 and became a U.S. citizen in 2008. Nafisi has held several academic leadership roles, including director of the Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) Dialogue Project and Cultural Conversations, a Georgetown Walsh School of Foreign Service, Centennial Fellow, and a fellow at Oxford University. She is the niece of a famous Iranian scholar, fiction writer and poet Saeed Nafisi. Azar Nafisi is best known for her 2003 book Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, which remained on The New York Times Best Seller list for 117 weeks, and has won several literary awards, including the 2004 Non-fiction Book of the Year Award from Booksense. In addition to Reading Lolita in Tehran, Nafisi has authored, Things I've Been Silent About: Memories of a Prodigal Daughter, The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books and That Other World: Nabokov and the Puzzle of Exile. Her newest book, Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times will be published in March 2022. Advance uncorrected proof copies are typically produced only in a variety limited quantity with the Not for Resale stipulation. The foundational text for the acclaimed New York Times and international best seller Reading Lolita in Tehran. The ruler of a totalitarian state seeks validation from a former schoolmate, now the nation's foremost thinker, in order to access a cultural cache alien to his regime. A literary critic provides commentary on an unfinished poem that both foretells the poet's death and announces the critic's secret identity as the king of a lost country. The greatest of Vladimir Nabokov's enchanters, Humbert, is lost within the antithesis of a fairy story, in which Lolita does not hold the key to his past but rather imprisons him within the knowledge of his distance from that past. In this precursor to her international best seller Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi deftly explores the worlds apparently lost to Nabokov's characters, their portals of access to those worlds, and how other worlds hold a mirror to Nabokov's experiences of physical, linguistic, and recollective exile. Written before Nafisi left the Islamic Republic of Iran, and now published in English for the first time and with a new introduction by the author, this book evokes the reader's quintessential journey of discovery and reveals what caused Nabokov to distinctively shape and reshape that journey for the author.