Poet Kaveh Akbar’s new novel on loss, displacement, identity and nationhood is an experiment in narrative style. Vuong’s exploration of the mother-son relationship finds a parallel in Akbar’s lonely Iranian-American son searching for an answers about his mother’s untimely death. Akbar presents a rounded character who is easy to understand but difficult to reach, much like Karen Jennings’s 53-year old …
searches for meaning in this wry debut novel Kaveh Akbar's Martyr! is very much its own creation, but you might think of it as an Iranian American spin on John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces — wedded to Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch. Because he's a poet, Cyrus's search for meaning involves writing a book of poems about martyrs, figures …
Kaveh Akbar on his debut novel 'Martyr!' SCOTT SIMON, HOST: Cyrus Shams is both the son of the Middle East and the American Middle West, who's been instilled with tragedy. AKBAR: The way the Iranian government yoked itself to cultural and religious ideas around martyrdom and harness those towards its own sort of propagandistic ends is a story that I …
