Martyr!

Martyr!Kaveh Akbar is one of my favorite writers. Ever. Tommy Orange Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mothers plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his fathers 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

and led critics at NPR to herald Hanif Abdurraqib as "one of the most essential voices of his generation

and the front lines of 1970's social activism

that is what a good story does

drawn from interviews conducted by legendary writer and ethnographer Frank Bird Linderman and told in her own words

puberty rites

resolutions

During the short Arctic summers

Interspersing personal memoir with radical notions of self-help and collective recovery

Francis wants to take the tree with them--can they

why haven't we moved beyond peaceful protest

Dennis unmakes something in us

sanskaras (Hindu) and aquiqa (Muslim)