In the two decades following Khomeini’s revolution, while the streets and campuses of Tehran were the scene of violence, Azar Nafisi had to try his hand at one of the most difficult tasks: explaining the literature of the West to boys and girls increasingly exposed to Islamic indoctrination. When political and social conditions no longer allowed her to do so, Professor Nafisi quit teaching at the University of Tehran and secretly gathered seven of her most committed students at her home to read Western classics. As the fundamentalists take control, these young women remove their veils, talk about their innermost hopes, their loves and disappointments, their femininity and their search for a place in an increasingly oppressive society. Reading Lolita in Tehran, they celebrate the liberating power of literature in revolutionary Iran and shape their future.