On October 21, 2014, Viking Books released Nafisi's newest book, "The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books", in which using "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", "Babbitt", and "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter", as well as the writings of James Baldwin and many others, Nafisi responds to an Iranian reader that questioned whether Americans care about or need their literature. Jane Smiley wrote in The Washington Post that Nafisi "finds the essence of the American experience, filtered through narratives not about exceptionalism or fabulous success, but alienation, solitude and landscape." Laura Miller of Salon wrote that "No one writes better or more stirringly about the way books shape a reader’s identity, and about the way that talking books with good friends becomes integral to how we understand the books, our friends and ourselves.