Rittenhouse Book Club

Hey Folks!

Heard great things about this one and have been meaning to read it for a while:

"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."

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar, Hardcover | Barnes & Noble®

“Incandescent . . . Akbar has created an indelible protagonist, haunted, searching, utterly magnetic. But it speaks to Akbar’s storytelling gifts that Martyr! is both a riveting character study and piercing family saga . . . Akbar is a dazzling writer, with bars like you wouldn't believe . . . What Akbar pulls off in Martyr! is nothing short of miraculous.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Brilliant . . . steeped in humor and absurdity but deathly serious as well . . . The strength of Martyr! is that Akbar arranges its various messes well and doesn’t strive too hard to reconcile them.” —Los Angeles Times

“Martyr! is almost violently artful, full of sentences that stab, pierce, and slice with their beauty . . . Reading this prose can feel like watching an Olympic athlete perform household tasks: Akbar’s writing has the musculature of poetry that can’t rely on narrative propulsion and so propels itself. It’s tonally nuanced—in command of a dazzling spectrum of frequencies from comedic to tragic—rigorous, and surprising.” —The New Yorker

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