What is the role of literature, when a sitting president wages war on writers and the press? How can literature, through its free exchange, affect politics? In this galvanizing guide to resistance literature, Nafisi seeks to answer these questions. Drawing on her personal experiences as a Muslim woman and voracious reader growing up in the Islamic Republic of Iran, and today as a literature professor under a very different Republic, she crafts an argument for why, in a genuine democracy, we must engage with the enemy, and how literature can be a vehicle for doing so. Structured as a series of letter addressed to literary icons ranging from Toni Morrison and James Baldwin to Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood, Nafisi explores the most probing questioning of our time, and arms readers with a reading list for our present political era.