About the author
Kaveh Akbar is an Iranian American poet, editor, and novelist. His poetry collections Calling a Wolf a Wolf and Pilgrim Bell examine addiction, faith, language, desire, and recovery through compressed and formally attentive writing.
Martyr! is his first novel and carries those concerns into the story of Cyrus Shams, an Iranian American poet studying meaningful death while trying to understand family loss. The novel mixes comedy, dream, history, and contemporary art.
Where to start
Start with Martyr! for Akbar's fiction, then read Calling a Wolf a Wolf or Pilgrim Bell to see how addiction, belief, and language work differently in his poetry.
