Nantucket Book Festival alums Azar Nafisi and Will Schwalbe meet here for the first time. We had a feeling they would click. After all, Will Schwalbe's favorite question is "What are you reading?" And Azar calls herself a "promiscuous reader." They each read as if their life depended on it. You might find that they inspire you to do the same.
Will's passion for books, and talking about them, led him to form a book club with his mother -- just the two of them -- after she was diagnosed with cancer, an experience he recounted in The End Of Your Life Book Club. And it fueled his memoir, Books For Living, which included a memorable chapter on Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran. How wonderful, we thought, if we could get the two of them together, in conversation.
Azar likes to say that when two strangers bond over a book, they become intimate strangers. At a time when we are hungry for a sense of connectedness, Azar and Will show us the way.