About this Event
Please join us in person on Saturday, January 4th at 7:00pm central to help celebrate the paperback release of Martyr!by Kaveh Akbar. Kaveh will be in conversation with Exile MVP Lindsay Hunter! We are big, big, big fans of Kaveh and Lindsay and hope you will be able to join us for what is sure to be a wonderful and memorable evening!
About Martyr!:
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.
About the authors:
Kaveh Akbar’s poems appear in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. He is the author of two poetry collections: Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf, in addition to a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic. He is also the editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets on the Divine. He lives in Iowa City.
Lindsay Hunter received her MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She co-founded and co-hosted the groundbreaking Quickies! reading series, an event that focused on flash fiction. Her first book, Daddy’s, a collection of flash fiction, was published in 2010 by featherproof books, a boutique press in Chicago. Her second collection, DON’T KISS ME, was published by FSG Originals in 2013 and was named one of Amazon’s 10 Best Books of the Year: Short Stories. Her first novel, Ugly Girls, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in November 2014. The Huffington Post called it “a story that hits a note that’s been missing from the chorus of existing feminist literature.” Her latest novel, Eat Only When You’re Hungry, was a Book of the Month Club selection, a finalist for the 2017 Chicago Review of BooksFiction Award, and a 2017 NPR Great Read. She produces and hosts the podcast I’m a Writer But, a series about writers with kids, jobs, and/or lives, and how they make it all work (or don’t). Lindsay’s fifth book, a novel titled Hot Springs Drive, is out now on Roxane Gay Books and was named one of the 12 Best Thrillers of the Year by the Washington Post. She lives in Chicago with her family.
About the event:
This is a free, in person event and registration is required. Please click on the link below to register for free. Kaveh and Lindsay will be happy to sign/personalize copies of their books after the event! Can't make it to the event? Signed copies will be available in store and online after the event.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Exile in Bookville, 410 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, United States
USD 0.00
