Burlington Public Library

This is the story of Azar Nafisi's dream and of the nightmare that made it come true. For two years before she left Iran in 1997, Nafisi gathered seven young women at her house every Thursday morning to read and discuss forbidden works of Western literature. They were all former students whom she had taught at university. They were unaccustomed to being asked to speak their minds, but soon they began to open up and to speak more freely, not only about...

A middle-aged man marries an oppressive widow in order to be near and carry on an affair with her nymphet daughter.

A very rare pitacohi bird falls in love with a swallow and plucks his colorful feathers to transform dry, barren San Juan Capistrano into a haven of flowers and flowing water, which the swallows can easily find when returning from their annual migration.

"In 1948, Sally Horner was just eleven years old when she was kidnapped by a man claiming to be an FBI agent. Seven years later, Vladimir Nabokov published Lolita, perhaps the most seminal novel of the twentieth century. Sarah Weinman's investigation into how the two are connected is a thrilling, heartbreaking mix of literary scholarship and true-crime writing."--Back cover.

In this expo of how young girls are sexualized in today's media, the author uses examples from popular TV shows, magazines, movies, and Web sites to show for the first time all the ways in which sexuality is defined in media--often in ways detrimental to girls' healthy development--as well as effective and progressive strategies for resisting the violations and repressions that render girls sexually subordinate.