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In the introduction to her travelogue, Two Wings of a Nightingale: Persian Soul, Islamic Heart (2011), the New Zealand author Jill Worrall writes that “Iran is probably the most misunderstood country in the world, and its people are among the most feared” (Worrall). This statement alone is a testament to the significance of Iran, as a major locus in the Muslim Orient, in the Western imaginary, particularly in the mainstream Western discourse apropos the Oriental/Muslim Other. It also bespeaks the power of the representational regime through which the country, its people, and particularly its main religion, Islam, have been subject to constant tropes of Othering, demonization, marginalization, and negation in the West, not least in the United States. It is the dominance, ubiquity, authority, and serious cultural and political implications of such representations that lend urgency to a methodical analysis and critique of such regimes of knowledge production about the Oriental Other. This book, therefore, seeks to critique literary representations of Iran, which were part of the proliferation of literary productions informed by the two defining historical junctures of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran—and within that context the Iran–Iraq War (1980–8) and the Hostage Crisis (1979–81)—and what is now commonly referred to as 9/11. The corpus of literary texts dealing specifically with Iranian contexts has expanded exceedingly since the revolution and reached its apex in what Professor Hamid Dabashi has dubbed “the haymarket of post 9/11 anxieties” (Post-Orientalism 276). Sanaz Fotouhi has recorded that while between 1980 and 2001, no more than sixteen memoirs had been published by Iranians residing in the West, from 2001 to early 2012 at least fifty more memoirs were published (99), excluding works of fiction and poetry volumes—a trend that still continues. This book provides a much-needed analysis of this literary phenomenon in Iranian-American self-narratives, undertaking a critical perusal of three paramount memoirs penned by Iranian-American women, which are deemed to be paradigmatic works in their representations of Iran and Islam. The three texts are Betty Mahmoody’s Not without My Daughter (1987), as the quintessential pre-9/11 example of captivity narratives; Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (2003), as the iconic neo-Orientalist post-9/11 Iranian-American, and by extension Middle Eastern, memoir; and Professor Fatemeh Keshavarz’s Jasmine and Stars: Reading More than Lolita in Tehran (2007), as the paramount counter-narrative. While there also exist memoirs written by hyphenated Iranian- European women, none of them share the iconic status of the three memoirs in question, in terms of their popular reception, their impact on the perception of Iran and Islam, their engagement with political agendas, and the celebrity status of their authors. Furthermore, the ongoing tension in US-Iran relations lends a sense of urgency and topicality to Iranian-American memoirs, which is rather lacking in other memoirs. The critical exegesis of the texts in question is built primarily upon Edward Said’s theorization and critique of the concept of Orientalism in his seminal 1978 book of the same title, and its latter-day manifestation, that is, post-9/11 neo-Orientalism. The analysis of the three iconic texts seeks to reveal that notwithstanding their formal and, to a lesser extent, thematic differences, the narratives in question represent Iran and Islam within a long-established Orientalist frame of reference and through similar representational apparatus. Furthermore, even though these texts are products of two different eras, that is, pre- and post-9/11, the similarities in the social, political, and historical contexts of their production have significantly contributed to their promotion, dissemination, and reception in the United States, and more broadly in the West.