Body and Bread

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"In Body and Bread , Nan Cuba goes straight to the heart of love and death and families and religion and the land."—Grace Dane Mazur, author of Silk: Stories and Trespass: a novel 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). From Booklist Sam was her polestar, the big brother Sarah always looked up to, the one who could be a little wild, a little defiant, a little mysterious. It was Sam who first showed Sarah the relics and rituals of the ancient tribes that originally settled their corner of the Texas wilderness. In the 1960s, this was heady stuff, and the more Sam got into trouble—a stint in a Mexican jail, a shotgun wedding to the daughter of a farmworker—the more Sarah emulated him. She bleached her hair white blond, set off an explosion that nearly killed her friends, and joined a spiritual commune. Eventually, Sarah would grow weary of such experimentation, finding another polestar in her archaeological studies of Native American cultures. For Sam, however, the quest would not end until he had physically destroyed the source of his self-inflicted pain, leaving behind a family in turmoil. Despite its erratic narrative arc, which leaves many secrets and allegations unexplained, Cuba’s piercing coming-of-age saga vibrates with youthful yearnings. --Carol Haggas Review "...as with Salinger, Cuba's plot is almost incidental. Her writerly strengths lie in morsels of feeling perfectly put, and experiences rendered with unsettling aptness." --Emily DePrang, Texas Observer One of the "Ten Titles to Pick Up Now." --Abbe Wright, O Magazine "'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." -- Pam Johnston, San Antonio Express-News "Like every person, every family contains contradictions, oppositions...that's just one truth examined in Nan Cuba's sweeping, carefully observed début novel, Body and Bread ." Beth Castrodale, smallpresspicks.com. "Nan Cuba's prose is clear and lyrical; the voice of her narrator strong, intimate, engaging. She spins her tale without fear and achieves the difficult movements in time necessary to tell the story with grace, effortlessness and skill."--Miroslav Penkov, Judge, PEN/Southwest Award in Fiction " 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,