Sometimes a book performs well in hardcover, and then becomes turbo-charged in paperback, as book club recommendations exponentially amplify the buzz. It happened with Sue Monk Kidd's first novel, The Secret Life of Bees—which sold three times as many paperbacks last fall as it did at the beginning of the year—and to a significant extent with Julia Glass's Three Junes. And now, it may be happening with a nonfiction title, Azar Nafisi's "memoir in books," Reading Lolita in Tehran.
After a steady hardcover run from last April through December—Random House shipped 90,000 copies with an astonishing 2% return rate—Nafisi's book has barrelled onto the New York Times bestseller list in paperback, reaching #2 after three weeks on sale, with 63,000 copies shipped. True, it's easier to crack the Times list on the nonfiction side than in fiction—where trade paperbacks compete with lower-priced mass market titles. But according to independent booksellers, the book already has proven staying power.
"There's been a buzz about this book for a while, generated in part by booksellers like me," said Gayle Shanks, co-owner of Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, Ariz. Indeed, the book's position at #1 on Book Sense's paperback nonfiction list, and its 28-week run on Book Sense's hardcover list last year, suggests as much. "I've been recommending it to everyone," she added—including NPR's Susan Stanberg, who interviewed Shanks for the annual gift-book roundup on All Things Considered.
At Seattle's Elliott Bay Bookstore, Reading Lolita in Tehran emerged as one of the few spring hardcovers, aside from Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, to hold its ground into the fall season. "It's lasted mainly through word of mouth," said trade book buyer Rick Simonson, who noted that sales actually grew in the last three months of the year, partly because some customers bought multiple copies as gifts.
In hardcover, the book was helped by crucial early interviews on NPR's Fresh Air and in the New York Times and a spate of prominent reviews that helped build momentum as Nafisi began her hardcover tour. Returning to the road this month to promote the paperback, Nafisi is getting another round of attention, with NPR bookings in several cities and audiences as large as 400 people at her store and library appearances.
"She's a really great speaker, and she's had a year to build a base of fans," said Richard Gregg, events coordinator at Brookline Booksmith in Brookline, Mass., where Nafisi recently drew a crowd of 150 men and women, including retirees, high school students and a contingent that was fluent in both Farsi and English. At the store, Reading Lolita finished the year ahead of other popular titles like Chuck Palahniuk's Diary and Dennis Lehane's Shutter Island, reaching #13 on the list of top 25 hardcovers for 2003. "The paperback will ride that wave," Gregg predicted.
A Cultural Link Through Books
It was the book's striking cover and intriguing title that initially spurred Shanks to pick up the galley. "The notion of reading Nabokov's Lolita in Tehran was an eye-opener," she said. As someone who reads mostly fiction, Shanks was captivated by Nafisi's account of how she quit her job as a professor at the University of Tehran out of frustration with the ideological and physical restrictions placed on her, and found solace in the course in Western classics she secretly taught to seven young women in her home. "It's easier to digest a nonfiction book if it reads like a novel," explained Shanks. "People are interested in different cultures, but they don't know how to enter them. Really wonderful writing like this can open a door."
For Simonson, the book's appeal was in its ability to convey "a sense of the vitality and necessity of reading," and its premise that Iranian of people of different classes have shared the heightened experience of reading that Nafisi describes. Gregg agreed, adding, "You really come away with a new perspective on great books—The Great Gatsby, Madame Bovary. A lot of our customers have read the classics, and a few have bought Lolita because they were inspired to go back and read it." Shanks, too, has logged a modest uptick in sales of several related classics, and she plans to include them in a display alongside Nafisi's paperback.
All three booksellers agreed the book is likely to be one of the year's biggest nonfiction paperbacks. And in an election year when the U.S. is more actively engaged in Middle Eastern politics than ever, the popularity of a book that bridges major cultural differences is something that booksellers, and Random House, can be proud of.
