First Published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

A New York Times bestseller The author of the beloved #1 New York Times bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran returns with the next chapter of her life in books—a passionate and deeply moving hymn to America Ten years ago, Azar Nafisi electrified readers with her multimillion-copy bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran, which told the story of how, against the backdrop of morality squads and executions, she taught The Great Gatsby and other classics of English and American literature to her eager students in Iran. In this electrifying follow-up, she argues that fiction is just as threatened—and just as invaluable—in America today. Blending memoir and polemic with close readings of her favorite novels, she describes the unexpected journey that led her to become an American citizen after first dreaming of America as a young girl in Tehran and coming to know the country through its fiction. She urges us to rediscover the America of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and challenges us to be truer to the words and spirit of the Founding Fathers, who understood that their democratic experiment would never thrive or survive unless they could foster a democratic imagination. Nafisi invites committed readers everywhere to join her as citizens of what she calls the Republic of Imagination, a country with no borders and few restrictions, where the only passport to entry is a free mind and a willingness to dream.

It was a bitter cold morning in March, 1908. A nineteen-year-old Jewish immigrant traversed the confusing and unfamiliar streets of Chicago–a one-and-a-half-hour-long journey–from his ghetto home on Washburne Avenue to the luxurious Lincoln Place residence of Police Chief George Shippy. He arrived at 9 a.m. Within minutes after knocking on the front door, Lazarus Averbuch lay dead on the hallway floor, shot no less than six times by the chief himself. Why Averbuch went to the police chief's house or exactly what happened after that is still not known. This is the most comprehensive account ever written about this episode that stunned Chicago and won the attention of the entire country. It does not "solve" the mystery as much as it places it in the context of a nation that was unsure how to absorb all of the immigrants flowing across its borders. It attempts to reconstruct the many different perspectives and concerns that comprised the drama surrounding the investigation of Averbuch's killing.

First published in 1956, this book has been described by the author as something of a biographical novel, somewhere between formal scholarly criticism and a more creative form of writing. It looks at the meaning of Blake’s visions and how the troubles of his life affected his poems known as the prophetic books. It focuses on the story of the universal human spirit that these books present.