Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

“The poet Kaveh Akbar turns a grieving young man’s search for meaning into a piercing family saga… What Akbar pulls off in Martyr! is nothing short of miraculous.” —The New York Times Book Review

Cyrus Shams, an Iranian American aspiring poet and recovering drug addict, wallows in a post-college malaise in a fictional Midwestern town. He’s working dead-end jobs and halfheartedly attending A.A., while grieving his parents’ deaths and, increasingly, fantasizing about his own. Cyrus is lost and sad, but this captivating first novel, by an author who is himself a poet, is anything but. As Akbar nudges Cyrus closer to uncovering a secret in his family’s past, he turns his protagonist’s quest for meaning — involving a road trip to New York and a revelatory encounter in the Brooklyn Museum — into an indelible affirmation of life, rife with inventive beauty, vivid characters and surprising twists of plot.

Kaveh Akbar is an Iranian American writer who has taken the literary scene by storm with his debut novel, Martyr!, one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year. He is also the author of the poetry collections Calling a Wolf a Wolf and Pilgrim Bell. Akbar is director of the undergraduate creative writing program at the University of Iowa. He is the founder of Divedapper and Poetry Editor of The Nation. In 2018, NPR called Akbar “poetry’s biggest cheerleader.” In 2024, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Akbar will appear at the 2025 Festival.

Reagan by Max Boot

“In his new biography, Max Boot reckons with the president who was once his hero and another who led him away from the Republican Party. Boot’s book enters a crowded field, but stands out for its deep research, lucid prose and command of its subject’s broad political and social context.” —The New York Times Book Review

This elegant biography of the 40th president stands out for its deep authority and nimble style. Boot, a historian and foreign policy analyst, grew up idolizing Ronald Reagan, but after a decade of interviews and research, he finds himself asking whether his onetime hero paved the way for Donald Trump, the man whose ascent to power led Boot to abandon the right. The book is a landmark work that shows how Reagan emerged from his New Deal roots to become a practiced Red baiter and racist dog whistler before settling into the role of the optimistic all-American elder statesman. “It is no exaggeration,” Boot writes, “to say that you cannot fully comprehend what happened to America in the 20th century without first understanding what happened to Ronald Reagan.”

Max Boot is a historian, bestselling author, columnist and national security analyst. He is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a columnist for The Washington Post. He is the author of a previous biography, The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam, and Reagan: His Life and Legend, released in September 2024. Boot will appear at the 2025 Festival.