“The two photographs [of Azar Nafisi’s underground literature class] should be placed side by side. Both embody the ‘fragile unreality’–to quote Nabokov on his own state of exile–of our existence in the Islamic Republic of Iran. One cancels the other, and yet without one, the other is incomplete. In the first photograph [of the class in their chadors], standing there in our black robes and scarves, we are as we had been shaped by someone else’s dreams. In the second [with chadors off, revealing Western-style street clothes], we appear as we imagined ourselves. In neither could we feel completely at home.”

–Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran