Azar Nafisi's spirited defence of fiction in a climate of utilitarianism is unlikely to be as big a success as Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003), which was translated into thirty-two languages and spent 117 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, but it is certainly necessary. Where Reading Lolita championed Western books in a country where they were being censored, The Republic of Imagination stands up for them in an American culture of growing indifference. As Nafisi notes, between her first book tour in 2003 and the next in 2009, twelve of the fourteen bookstores in Harvard Square had gone, along with hosts of others; the weekend book review feature had been dropped from major newspapers; and the Bloomberg News website had transferred book coverage to the luxury section, alongside yachts and wine. The “Common Core” initiative recommended a school curriculum of 70 percent “informational texts” as opposed to 30 percent literature. Americans appear to be following Gradgrind in the insistence on facts not fancy, and on education as a means to a job rather than as part of the formation of a citizen. Nafisi makes a strong case for the value of being an outsider to American culture in order to see it clearly, beginning her account from the point in 2008 when she became an American citizen and began to ponder what America meant to her. Part memoir, part literary critique, part social history, this engaging volume – which is beautifully illustrated by Peter Sis – weaves the defence of imaginative reading through a discussion centred on three books, Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt (1922), and Carson McCullers's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), with a short epilogue on James Baldwin's humanism. Huck embodies individualism and the heart, Babbitt is an anti-Huck eager for status and material success, McCullers emphasizes an essential loneliness in American society. The chapter on Twain, while deeply felt, may not greatly surprise scholars, though the discussion of Phelps Farm as a testing place for reality and illusion stands restatement. Tom Sawyer, like the Iranian clerics who expelled Nafisi from her university post for refusing to wear the veil, imposes his fantasies on others without any concern for the damaging results. The chapter on McCullers is noteworthy for an original discussion of the quality of light in William Faulkner, Albert Camus, and Eudora Welty, among others. By far the best chapter demonstrates the astonishing modernity of Lewis's scathing portrayal of America's materialism and the commodification of its citizens, particularly in relation to education. It was Babbitt who told his son that Shakespeare was pointless and that he should be taking courses in business English, to be able to write ads and pull in a pay check; Babbitt who sang the praises of home-study courses, the forerunners of today's online providers and “for-profit” institutions. Nafisi has a very sharp eye for philistinism and for corporate-speak, and rounds up many examples of Babbittization. “The Sermon on the Amount” by a televangelist educating his viewers in God's economic plan was particularly memorable, as was the Senator complaining that the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) project designed to understand the human interest in the past was not worth $24,803. But amidst the satire, Nafisi is also a sensitive and intelligent reader, emphasizing the pathos of Babbitt at the novel's melancholy close, and his enduring legacy in the works of John Cheever, John Updike, and Richard Ford. Reading Lolita in Tehran came under sustained attack from academics as embodying an individualistic, neoliberal form of criticism, but Nafisi remains unrepentant. Ideology is categorized as an academic fashion accessory (a Hermès handbag, in one wicked anecdote). The form is as individual as its argument, with the analysis tied to the memorialization of absent friends, and permeated with dialogue, memories and stories. The terror of Huck's South is juxtaposed with that of an Iranian woman friend, for example, fleeing torture and death, her youthful fantasies of revolutionary Iran as damaging as Tom's adventure novels. Nafisi also argues strongly that readers do not learn by “identifying” with characters but by encountering characters who are quite different to them, expanding their imaginative reach. As Einstein argued, “Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world” (quoted at 11).