“Lyrical, intelligent, and passionately written, Whisper Tapes reignites a long dormant conversation about the urgency of global feminism.” —Shilyh Warren, University of Texas at Dallas Kate Millett was already an icon of American feminism when she went to Iran in 1979. She arrived just weeks after the Iranian Revolution, to join Iranian women in marking International Women's Day. Intended as a day of celebration, the event turned into a week of protests. Millett, armed with film equipment and a cassette deck to record everything around her, found herself in the middle of demonstrations for women’s rights and against the mandatory veil. Listening to the revolutionary soundscape of Millett's audio tapes, Negar Mottahedeh offers a new interpretive guide to Revolutionary Iran, its slogans, habits, and women’s movement—a movement that, many claim, Millett never came to understand. Published with the fortieth anniversary of the Iranian Revolution and the women's protests that followed on its heels, Whisper Tapes re-introduces Millett's historic visit to Iran and lays out the nature of her encounter with the Iranian women's movement. “In offering a deeply contingent history, Negar Mottahedeh beautifully shows Kate Millett's simultaneous closeness to and distance from the events surrounding her.” —Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, Princeton University “Lyrical in style and poetic in meaning, Whisper Tapes challenges readers to adopt an intersectional view of Iranian feminist movements while adding layers and dimensionality to Millett’s preexisting literature.” ––Aisha Jitan, The Middle East Journal “Mottahedeh's illuminating study complements Millett's work and offers a more nuanced reading of a historic moment.” —Lucy Popescu, Times Literary Supplement

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BESTSELLER • The question isn't whether God speaks. The question is what does He have to say to you? The New York Times bestselling author of The Circle Maker teaches readers how to listen to God. WINNER OF THE ECPA CHRISTIAN BOOK AWARD FOR CHRISTIAN LIVING The voice that spoke the cosmos into existence is the same voice that parted the Red Sea, and made the sun stand still in the midday sky. One day, this voice will make all things new, but it’s also speaking to you now! That voice is God’s voice, and what we’ve learned from Scripture is that He often speaks in a whisper. Not to make it difficult to hear Him, but to draw us close. Many people have a tough time believing God still speaks. Sure, in ancient times and in mysterious ways, God spoke to His people, but is He still speaking now? Mark Batterson certainly believes so. And he wants to introduce you to the seven love languages of God; each of them unique and entirely divine. Some of them you might suspect but others will surprise you. By learning to tune in to and decipher each language, you’ll be able to hear His guidance in simple as well as life-altering choices. God is actively speaking through: Scripture, Desires, Doors, Dreams, People, Promptings, and Pain. Batterson gives you the tools you need to unlock each of these languages. God’s whisper can answer your most burning questions, calm your deepest fears, and fulfill your loftiest dreams. Discover how simple it is to hear God’s voice in every aspect of your life! He’s speaking, make sure you know how to listen!

The shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, would remain on the throne for the foreseeable future: This was the firm conclusion of a top-secret CIA analysis issued in October 1978. One hundred days later the shah--despite his massive military, fearsome security police, and superpower support was overthrown by a popular and largely peaceful revolution. But the CIA was not alone in its myopia, as Charles Kurzman reveals in this penetrating work; Iranians themselves, except for a tiny minority, considered a revolution inconceivable until it actually occurred. Revisiting the circumstances surrounding the fall of the shah, Kurzman offers rare insight into the nature and evolution of the Iranian revolution and into the ultimate unpredictability of protest movements in general. As one Iranian recalls, The future was up in the air. Through interviews and eyewitness accounts, declassified security documents and underground pamphlets, Kurzman documents the overwhelming sense of confusion that gripped pre-revolutionary Iran, and that characterizes major protest movements. His book provides a striking picture of the chaotic conditions under which Iranians acted, participating in protest only when they expected others to do so too, the process approaching critical mass in unforeseen and unforeseeable ways. Only when large numbers of Iranians began to think the unthinkable, in the words of the U.S. ambassador, did revolutionary expectations become a self-fulfilling prophecy. A corrective to 20-20 hindsight, this book reveals shortcomings of analyses that make the Iranian revolution or any major protest movement seem inevitable in retrospect.

A new book by Kate Millett, one of our most important feminists, is always a major literary event, and "Going to Iran", illustrated with dramatic photographs by Sophie Keir, is a powerfully political and beautifully written work. Iran has been in the international headlines continuously for more than three years: the Shah's expulsion, his sickness and death, the struggles before the Ayatollah Khomeini dropped the curtain to the world, the taking of the hostages. Millett had worked for many years with a humanitarian group of Iranian dissenters, CAIFI, the Committee for Artistic and Intellectual Freedom in Iran, which protested conditions under the Shah. After his downfall, when Iran was poised between a new democracy and religious totalitarianism, Iranian feminists sent an urgent please to their sisters around the world as they began to organize an Iranian women's movement to protect their threatened rights. Kate Millett and Sophie Keir answered the call, and they were among the very few Americans to see that nation in the nascent stages of revolution. "Going to Iran" is the dramatic, highly personal account of their extraordinary stay in the "new" Iran, where they made friendships with courageous Iranian women but where they were defamed and threatened with death, where one can get seventy-five lashes for taking a drink, where homosexuals and children as arbitrarily executed. Millett decries the Shah, who presented a civilized face to the world but kept vats of acid to dispose of his torture victims, but she decries the Ayatollah as well, for sanctioning the fanaticism of Moslems who disrupt women's rallies, attacked women demonstrators, even schoolgirls, and threatened all those who refused to wear the "chador" (veil), which the new regime has made a compulsory symbol of female submission.

"Opening the enormous metal gate, the guard suddenly took away my blindfold and asked me, tauntingly, if I would recognize my parents. With my eyes hurting from the strange light and anger in my voice, I assured him that I would. Suddenly I was pushed through the gate and the door was slammed behind me. After more than eight years, here I was, finally, out of jail . . . ." In this haunting account, Shahla Talebi remembers her years as a political prisoner in Iran. Talebi, along with her husband, was imprisoned for nearly a decade and tortured, first under the Shah and later by the Islamic Republic. Writing about her own suffering and survival and sharing the stories of her fellow inmates, she details the painful reality of prison life and offers an intimate look at a critical period of social and political transformation in Iran. Somehow through it all—through resistance and resolute hope, passion and creativity—Talebi shows how one survives. Reflecting now on experiences past, she stays true to her memories, honoring the love of her husband and friends lost in these events, to relate how people can hold to moments of love, resilience, and friendship over the dark forces of torture, violence, and hatred. At once deeply personal yet clearly political, part memoir and part meditation, this work brings to heartbreaking clarity how deeply rooted torture and violence can be in our society. More than a passing judgment of guilt on a monolithic "Islamic State," Talebi's writing asks us to reconsider our own responses to both contemporary debates of interrogation techniques and government responsibility and, more simply, to basic acts of cruelty in daily life. She offers a lasting call to us all. "The art of living in prison becomes possible through imagining life in the very presence of death and observing death in the very existence of life. It is living life so vitally and so fully that you are willing, if necessary, to let that very life go, as one would shed chains on the legs. It is embracing, and flying on the wings of death as though it is the bird of freedom."

The protests following Iran's fraudulent 2009 Presidential election took the world by storm. As the Green Revolution gained protestors in the Iranian streets, #iranelection became the first long-trending international hashtag. Texts, images, videos, audio recordings, and links connected protestors on the ground and netizens online, all simultaneously transmitting and living a shared international experience. #iranelection follows the protest movement, on the ground and online, to investigate how emerging social media platforms developed international solidarity. The 2009 protests in Iran were the first revolts to be catapulted onto the global stage by social media, just as the 1979 Iranian Revolution was agitated by cassette tapes. And as the world turned to social media platforms to understand the events on the ground, social media platforms also adapted and developed to accommodate this global activism. Provocative and eye-opening, #iranelection reveals the new online ecology of social protest and offers a prehistory, of sorts, of the uses of hashtags and trending topics, selfies and avatar activism, and citizen journalism and YouTube mashups.

For decades, political observers and pundits have characterized the Islamic Republic of Iran as an ideologically rigid state on the verge of collapse, exclusively connected to a narrow social base. In A Social Revolution, Kevan Harris convincingly demonstrates how they are wrong. Previous studies ignore the forceful consequences of three decades of social change following the 1979 revolution. Today, more people in the country are connected to welfare and social policy institutions than to any other form of state organization. In fact, much of Iran’s current political turbulence is the result of the success of these social welfare programs, which have created newly educated and mobilized social classes advocating for change. Based on extensive fieldwork conducted in Iran between 2006 and 2011, Harris shows how the revolutionary regime endured though the expansion of health, education, and aid programs that have both embedded the state in everyday life and empowered its challengers. This first serious book on the social policies of the Islamic Republic of Iran opens a new line of inquiry into the study of welfare states in countries where they are often overlooked or ignored.