In 1851 Leo Tolstoy enlisted in the Russian army and was sent to the Caucasus to help defeat the Chechens. During this war a great Avar chieftain, Hadji Murad, broke with the Chechen leader Shamil and fled to the Russians for safety. Months later, while attempting to rescue his family from Shamil's prison, Hadji Murad was pursued by those he had betrayed and, after fighting the most heroic battle of his life, was killed.
Tolstoy, witness to many of the events leading to Hadji Murad's death, set down this story with painstaking accuracy to preserve for future generations the horror,...

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...

The most beloved Iranian novel of the twentieth century

"God forbid, I've fallen in love with Layli " So begins the farce of our narrator's life, one spent in a large extended Iranian family lorded over by the blustering, paranoid patriarch, Dear Uncle Napoleon. When Uncle Napoleon's least-favorite nephew falls for his daughter, Layli, family fortunes are reversed, feuds fired up and resolved, and assignations attempted and thwarted.

First published in Iran in the 1970s and adapted into a hugely successful television series, this beloved novel is now "Suggested Reading" in Azar...

In her bestselling memoir 'Reading Lolita in Tehran', Azar Nafisi opened her world to us, offering a vibrant portrait of women's lives in Iran. In this text, Nafisi returns to Iran and her childhood to deliver a moving portrait of a family's life, a life lived in thrall to Nafisi's powerful mother.

The definitive translation by Dick Davis of the great national epic of Iran--now newly revised and expanded to be the most complete English-language edition

Dick Davis--"our pre-eminent translator from the Persian" (The Washington Post)--has revised and expanded his acclaimed translation of Ferdowsi's masterpiece, adding more than 100 pages of newly translated text. Davis's elegant combination of prose and verse allows the poetry of the Shahnameh to sing its own tales directly, interspersed sparingly with clearly marked explanations to ease along modern...