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A newly sober and 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 who is living her last days at the Brooklyn Museum. Electrifying, funny and totally original, Martyr! announces the arrival of a new essential voice in contemporary fiction.
Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with a legacy of violence and loss: his mother's plane was shot down in the skies over the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father's life in America was limited by his job slaughtering chickens on a Midwest factory farm. Cyrus is a drunkard, drug addict and poet whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past – to an uncle who crossed Iranian battlefields dressed as an angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and towards her mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery which suggests that she may not have been who or what she appeared to be.
The martyrdom of Kaveh Akbar! is a paean to how we spend our lives searching for meaning – in faith, in art, in ourselves, in others.
Kaveh Akbar's poems appear in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Paris Review, Best American Poetry and elsewhere. He is the author of two collections of poetry: Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf, as well as a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic. He is also the editor of the Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 100 Poets on the Divine. He lives in Iowa City.
Akbar will be joined in conversation with Clint Smith, editor at The Atlantic. He is the author of the narrative nonfiction book How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, which was a #1 New York Times bestseller, and poetry collections Counting Descent, which won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Book of Poetry from the American Library Association Black Caucus and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award and most recently Above Ground. His poetry collection, Above Ground, was recently released on March 28. Smith is also the host of the YouTube series Crash Course Black American History. Born and raised in New Orleans, he currently lives in Maryland with his wife and two children.
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