Kaveh Akbar is the author of the novel Martyr! and two books of poetry, Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf. He is also the author of a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic, and editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets on the Divine and, with Paige Lewis, co-editor of Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction and Deliverance. Born in Tehran, Iran, Kaveh teaches at the University of Iowa. His writing appears in the New Yorker, PBS NewsHour, Paris Review, Best American Poetry, The New York Times, and elsewhere. Since 2020, Kaveh has served as poetry editor for The Nation.
Genres: Literary Fiction
Books containing stories by Kaveh Akbar
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Kaveh Akbar recommends
Our Long Marvelous Dying (2024)
Anna DeForest
"Anna DeForest's Our Long Marvelous Dying gives us a novelist fully in command of their instrument, staring searchingly at death without the dubious veils of euphemism or willed obliviousness. We see dying in the macro - a young doctor navigating a global death event exacerbated by myriad social and political pathologies - set against more quotidian deaths: passion crumbling within a relationship, personal agency eroding as a child is unexpectedly taken in. But what elevates Our Long Marvelous Dying into the realm of the rapturously readable is DeForest's uncanny gift for lyric language. One can almost pick out voices - Patacara, Lorca, Durkheim, Kahlo - with whom Our Long Marvelous Dying speaks. A true artist brings an impossible thing into utter clarity; with this novel, DeForest enters with singular vision into a species-old conversation about what happens - to the dead and to the living - when we die."
God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer (2024)
Joseph Earl Thomas
"What's thrilling to me about God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer is the faith Joseph Earl Thomas places in his readers. There's a supersaturation here that reminds me of Denis Johnson's vertiginous moral questing, and a topography of mind and place that kept making me think of Teju Cole's poet-doctor of the modern metropolis. Thomas gives us a fully peopled world, not by speaking in grand oracular exposition, but by getting granular - we see the Reebok slides on a romantic rival, the crinkled cookie wrappers out of which grow a friendship. It's such a deftly choreographed dance - intoxicating, propulsive - and the result is utterly mesmerizing: here is a whole cosmos, as vivid and unprecedented as our own."
Wandering Stars (2024)
Tommy Orange
"In Wandering Stars, Tommy Orange opens us up to these big lives full of hope and triumph and love and freedom - but then the world comes in, history comes in, drugs and nation and bullets and the big and small lonelinesses come in. Richard Pryor said he wanted to get you laughing so your mouth would be open when he poured the poison down, and that's what Orange is doing here. Anyone can say a complicated thing in a complicated way, but Tommy says the hardest things plain - beyond artifice, beyond confection. That clarity, that radical lucidity, that's the mark of true genius, a word I use here without hyperbole. Think Kafka, Lispector, Borges. Wandering Stars is the kind of book that saves lives, that makes remaining in the world feel a little more possible. It's art of the highest order, written by one of our language's most significant and urgent practitioners."
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