96 years after World Literature Today was founded at the University of Oklahoma, the magazine is featuring its first OU alum on the front cover.
Bestselling author Azar Nafisi serves as the face of the May issue, which is fittingly themed after the “future of the book” and the important role literature plays in preserving ideas. Nafisi is an Iranian-American author best known for her book “Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books.”
“Reading Lolita in Tehran” examines the role literature played in Nafisi’s life as a teacher during the Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War. She has written several other books, including “Things I’ve Been Silent About: Memories of a Prodigal Daughter,” “The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books,” “That Other World: Nabokov and the Puzzle of Exile,” and her most recent work, “Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times.”
“(“Reading Lolita in Tehran”) is a bestselling book that put (Nafisi) on the map, especially in the U.S., thinking about our own political history with the hostage crisis in 1979,” said Daniel Simon, editor in chief of World Literature Today. “Over the years, we’ve always been interested in her other essay collections and other books and just thought the timing would be perfect for this particular issue and getting her voice into the magazine. She promotes freedom of speech and the role of books and reading and writing in terms of our political climate today.”
Nafisi attended OU as a graduate student and received her Ph.D. in English in 1979. In “Read Dangerously,” she mentions some of her experiences at the university, like reading Plato for the first time in Professor James Yoch’s “Backgrounds to Renaissance Literature” course. She describes her experience debating a classmate over Plato’s “The Republic” and touches on her involvement in protesting against the Vietnam War, experiences which connect to her explorations of the power that words and literature have to shape viewpoints.
To some, it may be surprising that a renowned author like Nafisi has roots at an Oklahoma college, but Simon is keenly aware of the state’s history as a nexus of ideas and cultures.
“Oklahoma has been a crossroads for language and culture going back millennia,” Simon said. “I think it makes sense for WLT to be situated here and to be like an inland harbor—which is how some of the earliest editors talked about it—for books and culture.”
World Literature Today was founded in 1927 by Roy Temple House as Books Abroad. Dr. House was an OU faculty member who established the journal to expose readers to the world of international literature. Over the course of its 96 years of uninterrupted publication (making it one of the oldest continuously published literary periodicals in the United States), World Literature Today has reached people across the globe. RC Davis-Undiano has served as the unit’s executive director since 1999.
“We’ve had writers who have told us that, during the Cold War, they were behind the Iron Curtain, and World Literature Today was really the only source of information they could have access to about literature from the rest of the world,” Simon said. “It's definitely been a two-way street in terms of bringing knowledge of international writers to an English-speaking American audience as well as having that publication go out to readers all over the world.”
Regarding this issue’s theme of the “future of the book,” World Literature Today is itself a demonstration of the power that literature has to spread and preserve ideas. With the magazine’s centennial approaching in 2027, Simon stressed the perennial importance of global literature.
“We live in a globalized society, and it’s important to have the kind of intercultural understanding that reading great writers can bring,” Simon said. “There’s so much exciting work that’s being published these days by writers in their 20s and 30s who are bringing new voices to the American scene, like immigrant writers and others who have been neglected for so long. We’re excited to be a mirror that we’re holding up to that diversity in our society as well as from abroad.”
Those interested in World Literature Today can use the coupon code OUALUM for a 20% off discount on a copy of the May issue or a subscription to WLT in print or digital formats. The offer is valid May 1-31, 2023.
This article was originally published by the OU Foundation.
