Welcome to the bookcase book nerds where we make the case for all kinds of books.

I've been walking down memory lame for the last couple of weeks and I've been listening to older episodes and I've forgotten that those are things I used to throw around.

So I'm going to bring them back.

We're bringing them back book nerds making the case for all kinds of. And I should enter, I'm Kate Gibson, by the way,

and I should probably remind you. I also have a co-host, if you care.

Well, I'm glad you got around to that. And of the bookcase, which I am delighted to be.

We have, I think, a very, very interesting book for you this week, and I couldn't recommend it more highly.

Kate and I have this agreement that unless we both love a book, we won't bring it on or we have to find something really redeeming in it if we don't particularly like it.

But in this case, I think it both has a five-star review from you and from me.

Yeah, I mean, when I say we make the case for all kinds of books, I feel like I'm going to make a hard case for the book we have today. I almost want to be a bit of a bookseller to our listeners on this one. The book is called martyr.

Exclamation point. No, that's not spelled out. That is actual punctuation. But I just, I want to make sure that you guys know is there, martyr. It's a novel by Kaveh Akbar. It is poetic. Well, he himself is a published poet, but it is poetic.

It is lyrical. There are some surreal elements to it. It is also very funny. It is a beautiful book.

And really, I hadn't heard a lot of, a ton of lip service about it beforehand. And it was one of those books that was a revelation to me.

So please, I recommend that you pick it up. Well, if you don't know going in, although we just

told you that he's a poet, you will realize it as you read it. Not only in the brief poems that he

introduces into the book as explainers of who his principal character, whose name is

Cyrus Shams, S-H-A-M-S, but the language itself, his prose is poetic at times. And it's

interesting, as you'll hear in our conversation, he makes the point that in a book of poetry,

and he has two published, each word, and there's about 10,000 words,

each word becomes so critical in poetry. But as he says, the same thing's true in prose,

and you have to worry about that, even though you're writing, as in this case 80 or 85,000 words.

As he says, no word is one-eighth as important as a word in poetry, that you have to, a poet approaching

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