Marjane Satrapi Announces Persepolis Speaking Tour

Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis and co-creator of the award-winning 2007 animated film adaptation, will be kicking off her U.S. speaking tour October 15^th in Washington, D.C. Her coming-of-age graphic memoir has been one of the most popular Common Reading choices nationwide with over 95 university adoptions. The story of growing up in Revolutionary Iran, it is both accessible for a variety of reading levels and profoundly relevant to American students’ rapidly expanding worldviews.

Coming Of Age With Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep

By Curtis Sittenfeld, author of Prep: A Novel (Random House Trade Paperbacks, November 2005).

When Prep was published, I was thrilled that it resonated with so many people. Countless readers sought me out to tell me that it captured their own feelings of awkwardness, insecurity, and excitement when they left home for the first time. What I hadn’t anticipated was that, in most cases, they were referring to their experiences not at boarding school but in college. Although my protagonist, Lee, is fourteen when she travels to Massachusetts to enroll in the elite Ault School, her adventures and misadventures actually reflect those of many college freshmen: her exposure to other students whose intelligence and sophistication impress and intimidate her and whose families are either far wealthier or far poorer than hers; her shifting relationship with her own family at home; the intimacy of dorm life, where she might find herself brushing her teeth next to someone she’s never spoken to; and the confusion and joy of early sexual experimentation.