Each year, Memphis Reads uses a good book to introduce first year students to the university community and our shared mission to explore ideas and broaden horizons. Join students and faculty members from across the university in reading this year’s selection, Marjane Satrapi’s The Complete Persepolis, an autobiographical novel that looks like a comic book at the same time that it tells a moving and funny story about life in Iran during the Islamic revolution in the 1970s and 1980s. As Luc Sante wrote in his New York Times review of the book, “it is wildly charming. Satrapi's voice is as artfully artless as her graphic style, never giving any indication of effort or calculation but simply communicating, in a way that feels unmediated, like a letter from a friend, in this case a wonderful friend: honest, strong-willed, funny, tender, impulsive, self-aware.”

As part of our exploration of Persepolis, Firoozeh Dumas, the author of the memoir Funny in Farsi will visit campus and lead a viewing and discussion of the film version of Persepolis (which Satrapi co-wrote and co-directed). Other campus-wide discussions and activities will explore the questions that the book raises about revolution, political repression, and individual freedom.