About this item
A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. Electrifying, funny, and wholly original, Martyr! heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in contemporary fiction.. "Kaveh Akbar is one of my favorite writers. Ever." - Tommy Orange, Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of There There. "The best novel you'll ever read about the joy of language, addiction, displacement, martyrdom, belonging, homesickness." - Lauren Groff, best-selling author of Matrix and Fates and Furies. Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother's plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian gulf in a senseless accident; and his father's life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest.
About the Author
Kaveh Akbar is the founding editor of Divedapper. His poems appear in The New Yorker, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Tin House, PBS NewsHour, The Poetry Review, and elsewhere. His debut collection, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, will be published by Alice James Books in Fall 2017. He is also the author of the chapbook Portrait of the Alcoholic. The recipient of a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a Pushcart Prize, and a Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, Kaveh was born in Tehran, Iran, and is a Visiting Professor in the Purdue University MFA program.
