Three of Ali Khamenei's favorite novels

Ali Khamenei is Iran’s Supreme Leader.

The Iranian journalist and writer Akbar Ganji has an essay in the current Foreign Affairs (Sept/Oct 2013),  "Who Is Ali Khamenei?".

"As a young man, Khamenei loved novels," Ganji writes. "He read such Iranian writers as Muhammad Ali Jamalzadah, Sadeq Chubak, and Sadeq Hedayat but came to feel that they paled before classic Western writers from France,