Body and Bread

by Nan Cuba

Overview

Years after her brother Sam's suicide, Sarah Pelton remains unable to fully occupy her world without him in it. Now, while her surviving brothers prepare to sell the family's tenant farm and a young woman's life hangs in the balance, Sarah is forced to confront the life Sam lived and the secrets he left behind. As she assembles the artifacts of her family's history in east Texas in the hope of discovering her own future, images from her work as an anthropologist—images of sacrifice, ritual, and death—haunt her waking dreams.

In this moving debut novel, Nan Cuba unearths the power of family legacies and the indelible imprint of loss on all our lives.

Nan Cuba is the founder and executive director emeritus of Gemini Ink, a nonprofit literary center, and is currently an assistant professor of English at Our Lady of the Lake University. As an investigative journalist, she reported on the causes of extraordinary violence in publications such as Life and D Magazine. Her stories, poems, and reviews have appeared in Quarterly West, Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry and Prose, The Bloomsbury Review, and the Harvard Review, among others. She is co-editor of Art at Our Doorstep: San Antonio Writers & Artists (Trinity University Press, 2008).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781938126062
Publisher:	Engine Books
Publication date:	05/07/2013
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Nan Cuba received her MFA in fiction from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, is the founder and executive director emeritus of Gemini Ink, a nonprofit literary center (www.geminiink.org), was twice the runner-up for the Dobie Paisano Fellowship, and received a Fundación Valparaiso Residency Grant in Mojácar, Spain. She is currently an assistant professor of English at Our Lady of the Lake University. As an investigative journalist, she reported on the causes of extraordinary violence in publications such as LIFE and D Magazine. Her stories, poems, and reviews have appeared in Quarterly West, Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry & Prose (runner-up for the journal’s fiction award), Bloomsbury Review, and Harvard Review, among others. She is coeditor of Art at Our Doorstep: San Antonio Writers & Artists (Trinity University Press, 2008).

Editorial Reviews

15 Riveting Reads to Pick Up in May 2013”
—O, The Oprah Magazine

"Cuba’s piercing coming-of-age saga vibrates with youthful yearnings."
—Carol Haggas, Booklist

“Summer Books: 15 New Releases to Put on Your Reading List”
—HuffPost Books

"Body and Bread is a beautiful examination of family dynamics in the wake of suffering, and the ways that grief continues to shape our lives far beyond the death of a loved one...a stunning debut novel." —Pam Johnston, San Antonio Express-News

“The quintessential Texas novel for the twenty-first century.”
—Catherine Kasper, Texas Books in Review

“Beautifully written, hauntingly true, expertly spanning multiple cultures, time periods and philosophies, Body and Bread is nothing short of a tour-de-force. You will be transported. You will be transformed.”
—David Bowles, The Monitor (South Texas)


"Body and Bread is a complex tapestry of lives, present and past, that come together to tell one woman's life. In viewing her life, we are given a bigger story reaching backwards and forward. I learned much about history reading this book. Cuba knows what the wise know; all our lives are interconnected into one common cloth. Here is bread for the spirit written from the heart." —Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street

"This remarkable novel is an account of a loss that transforms, and of the lives of those nearest its narrator as she carries them with her through the years. To read this beautiful and generous narrative, its passionately exact prose, is to experience the widening of its scope as it makes room for us all in its pages as a chronicle of the past histories that unfold for each of us, within our continuously present selves." —Chuck Wachtel, author of The Gates

"Nan Cuba is one of those essential writers for whom character and landscape are inextricably intertwined. Sarah Pelton and her difficult family couldn't live anywhere but Texas and Cuba tells their many layered story with dazzling intelligence and a rare understanding of the forces of self-destruction. A compelling debut." —Margot Livesey, author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy

"In Body and Bread, Nan Cuba has written a wonderful novel packed with superbly impossible characters who skirmish over the great questions of what is passed on and what can ever be left behind. The blood and guts of family life—its quixotic warfare and abiding love—spill out of this remarkable story. A rich and memorable book." —Joan Silber, author of Fools

"With its careful, heart-wrenching accumulation of the data of grief, BODY AND BREAD demonstrates how we demean life—our own, and the foreshortened lives of those we grieve—by living a half-life, inconsolable. Sarah Pelton goes so far out of her way to avoid the recent past that she propels herself into an ancient culture whose rituals help her excavate the absence with which she has supplanted memory and hope. With its luminous account of a just-vanished family history, its evocation of tragedy’s fragile aftermath, this novel reminds us that surviving is the hardest work of all. We dismiss, dismiss, and then—with a flicker of grace and fledgling gratitude—embrace our imperfect and evanescent second chances." —Debra Monroe, author of On the Outskirts of Normal

From the Publisher