Martyr!

Title:

Martyr!

Author:

Akbar, Kaveh, author.

Personal Author:

Akbar, Kaveh, author.

ISBN:

9780593537619

Edition:

First edition.

Physical Description:

331 pages ; 24 cm

General Note:

"This is a Borzoi book"--Copyright page.

Abstract:

"A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a search that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum"-- Provided by publisher.

Corporate Subject:

Brooklyn Museum -- Fiction.

Subject Term:

Poets -- Fiction.

Alcoholics -- Rehabilitation -- Fiction.

Iranian Americans -- Fiction.

Mothers -- Death -- Fiction.

Martyrs -- Fiction.

Inspiration -- Fiction.

Women painters -- Fiction.

Terminally ill -- Fiction.

Quests (Expeditions) -- Fiction.

Geographic Term:

Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.) -- Fiction.

Genre:

Novels.

Summary:

Holds:

Available:*

Library	Material Type	Shelf Number	Status
Searching... Belmont	Book	FICTION AKBAR	Searching... Unknown
Searching... East End	Book	FICTION AKBAR	Searching... Unknown
Searching... West End	Book	FICTION AKBAR	Searching... Unknown
Searching... West End	Book	FICTION AKBAR	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK * 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. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past--toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.

Kaveh Akbar's Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning--in faith, art, ourselves, others.

Reviews (1)

Kirkus Review

A philosophical discourse inside an addiction narrative, all wrapped up in a quest novel. Poet Akbar's debut in fiction features Cyrus Shams, a child of the Midwest and of the Middle East. When Cyrus was an infant, his mother, Roya, a passenger on a domestic flight in Iran, was killed by a mistakenly fired U.S. missile. His father, Ali, who after Roya died moved with Cyrus to small-town Indiana and worked at a poultry factory farm, has also died. Cyrus disappeared for a time into alcoholism and drugs. Now on the cusp of 30, newly sober but still feeling stuck in his college town, Cyrus becomes obsessed with making his life matter, and he conceives of a grand poetic project, The Book of Martyrs (at the completion of which, it seems, he may commit suicide). By chance, he discovers online a terminally ill Iranian American artist, Orkideh, who has decided to live out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum, having candid tête-à-têtes with the visitors who line up to see her, and Cyrus--accompanied by Zee, his friend and lover, who's understandably a bit alarmed by all this--embarks on a quest to visit and consult with and learn from her. The novel is talky, ambitious, allusive, deeply meditative, and especially good in its exploration of Cyrus as not being between ethnic or national identities but inescapably, radically both Persian and American. It succeeds so well on its own terms that the novel's occasional flaws--big coincidences, forays into other narrators that sometimes fall flat, dream-narratives, occasional small grandiosities--don't mar the experience in any significant way. Imperfect, yes, but intense, original, and smart. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.