Now here's a piece of good news for every braniac who has ever lost a boyfriend to a girl who could hardly spell three-letter words - brains are back, big-time. Harvard hottie Natalie Portman is Hollywood's It Girl, and Angelina Jolie is seducing the globe, not as a sexy onscreen siren, but in her role as Goodwill Ambassador for the UN's High Commissioner for Refugees. And while Portman's cause-elect is Finca International, a micro-finance organization that helps women in developing countries, and Jolie opts to advocate for the rights of refugees in Africa and Asia, regular women are also playing a role in dictating where the Western world focuses its attention. In an age where money talks, it has become a successful publishing venture to print books about the Middle East and other Muslim regions. These titles are flying off the shelves, and it's mainly women who are buying them. Long gone are the days when an intelligent woman's voice was hard to hear - female readers today are speaking loud and clear. Browse any bookstore or bestseller list for evidence that the publishing world is listening.

But why are women so interested in literature from these regions lately? Part of the reason is globalization. Today, most of us are used to the day's lead news stories focusing on activity on the other side of the globe, and in a post-9/11 world, we've become all too familiar with the painful consequences of failed international relations and cultural clashes. As our markets and politics become inextricably linked and increasingly complicated, we experience the collective need for mutual understanding even more deeply. The media and political focus on Islamic nations has brought them to our attention, and it has resulted in an urge to explore these cultures further. Research has shown that women are more likely than men to seek understanding through books, and it can be argued that this recent trend in Western literature is a response to the war on terror.

Another potential reason for why women are so taken with literature from abroad is that stories set in countries where women have few rights bring us stronger, more inspiring heroines. Not that all women in the West have it easy, but women in Islamic countries have to triumph in cultures that encourage polygamy; make girls legally eligible for marriage as early as the age of 9; have marriage, divorce and child custody laws that favor men; make female adultery or prostitution a crime punishable by death; and require women to cover themselves in public. As journalist Lauren Weiner wrote in Policy Review, "Americans by now seem bored and faintly embarrassed when feminist stories make the headlines. Who wants to hear about chauvinism at a stodgy American golf course when most of the meaningful barriers to female achievement in the United States have already been scaled?"

But whether it is politics or feminism that is sparking this interest in fiction from far away, our options for exotic reading materials are certainly not limited. Just as readers have become interested in learning about new subjects and societies, many authors have made it part of their mission to bring these faraway stories to us as we all try to unravel our cultural differences. However, these books are anything but overly optimistic, lighthearted accounts that simplify the difficulties of cultural clashes and female self-assertion. They are grim, serious portraits that often draw as much criticism as they do acclaim.

Azar Nafisi is the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, an autobiographical book in which she discusses the difficult political climate that led her to resign from a teaching position at a university in Tehran and to conduct clandestine study sessions with seven of her best female students. Most of the reading Nafisi chose for the course was banned by the strict Islamic government, and Reading Lolita in Tehran charts two years of secrecy, suspense and literature that changed all of the women involved. The book quickly became an international bestseller (holding the number-one spot on the New York Times bestseller list for over 21 weeks) that was translated into over 12 languages and sold rights in over 22 countries. But Nafisi, who was born in Iran and lived there until her 1997 exile, has been heavily criticized by other Iranians. "People from my country have said the book was successful because of a Zionist conspiracy and U.S. imperialism, and others have criticized me for washing our dirty laundry in front of the enemy," she says.

Diana Abu-Jaber, author of Crescent, which was awarded the 2004 PEN Award, and Arabian Jazz, winner of the 1994 Oregon Book Award, also met with severe criticism from the Arab community upon the publication of her novels. Abu-Jaber, who was born in upstate New York to an American mother and Jordanian father, met with many questions regarding the authenticity of her representation of the Arab community, both in the US and in the Middle East. "For me to write in English and have such an American identity can feel very much like an abandonment I think," the author says. "I'll never forget one woman who wrote to me after my first novel, Arabian Jazz, came out; she said, 'You naughty, naughty girl, do your parents know you wrote this book?'"

As difficult as the territory may be, many of these authors are bringing much-needed perspectives to the Western world about countries we do not understand, and no amount of criticism would dissuade the authors from this pursuit. Khaled Hosseini's debut novel, The Kite Runner, is the first book to be written in English by an Afghan. In the international bestseller, the Afghans are portrayed as a strong, self-sufficient people who are repeatedly forced to defend their country from invaders, and the novel provides a unique perspective on a country that had escaped the West's attention until the events of September 11th. Hosseini practices medicine full-time in California, but he wakes up at 4 a.m. to fit writing into his schedule because exploring these topics is essential to him. His philosophy on the purpose of fiction is evident in his advice to aspiring writers: "Write about things that get under your skin and keep you up at night."

Not all of these books, however, are set in dark places far away, and the women are not necessarily battling terrible odds. Often, placing a woman from a conservative country into the bustling, metropolitan cities of the West and watching her wrestle to bring both worlds together while empowering herself results in strong, lovable and independent heroines. Such is the case in Monica Ali's Brick Lane, in which Nazneen, an 18-year-old Bangladeshi girl, accepts an arranged marriage to a Bengali immigrant twice her age who lives in England, and Bharati Mukherjee's The Tree Bride, in which a San Francisco woman draws strength from her great-great aunt's legacy as a Bengali revolutionary to combat a man who is obsessed with killing her.

Ali's Nazneen goes from a young woman who never questioned her fate, to a strong-willed woman who learns to bend fate to her own wishes. And Mukherjee's Tara Chatterjee travels back through time and experiences how her great-great aunt fought to win Bengal's independence from India, and she learns of the cruelty and abuse inflicted on the Indians by the British conquerors in the name of "civilization." She then takes these lessons of power and strength and applies them to contemporary life. Brick Lane was nominated for some of literature's most prestigious prizes, including the Man Booker Prize and the Guardian First Novel Award, and Mukherjee was the first naturalized American to win the National Book Critics Circle Award - evidence that forceful women are not only popular, but literary powerhouses as well.

And the best illustrations of a final potential reason for our current obsession with multicultural reads are Yann Martel's Life of Pi and Zadie Smith's White Teeth. Winner of the Man Booker Prize, Life of Pi traces the journey of 16-year old Pi Patel, from Pondicherry, India, through a 227-day post-shipwreck journey on a lifeboat across the Pacific Ocean, with no company other than a Bengal tiger. Whitbread First Novel Winner White Teeth is a hilarious examination of the immigrant experience in a post-colonial world, and it follows Bengali Muslim Samad Iqbal and his friend Archibald Jones, as the two journey through marriage, parenthood, failed careers and life's disappointments. These two innovative and witty novels raise the possibility that we might be reading all of these books not because of the heroines they present to us or the cultural implications they generate, but simply because of the talent of their authors and the quality of the writing. Both of these novels, along with the titles mentioned previously, are brilliant, original stories - and perhaps it is their entertainment value that first draws our attention to them.

In the end, perhaps it is irrelevant why we picked up these books. What matters is that through these novelists' beautiful stories, we enter the worlds we hear about on the news, and we leave these works with a better understanding of the world we are all shaping. If you are one of those turning to literature for guidance on how to become an active citizen of the world, consider the books discussed above your must-read list. These are the books everybody's talking about because of the insights they provide - and because they're pretty good reads. Come on? Sailing through the Pacific on a lifeboat with a tiger? Tell me you'll find that in a John Grisham novel.