The Audio Series: Nan Cuba

Our new audio series "The Authors Read. We Listen." is an incredibly special one for us. Hatched in a NYC club during BEA week, this feature requires more work of the author than any of the ones that have come before. And that makes it all the more sweeter when you see, or rather, hear them read excerpts from their own novels, in their own voices, the way their stories were meant to be heard.


Today, Nan Cuba reads an excerpt from her novel Body and Bread. Body and Bread (Engine Books) was named one of “Ten Titles to Pick Up Now” in O, Oprah’s Magazine.   Nan also co-edited Art at our Doorstep: San Antonio Writers and Artists (Trinity University Press), and published other work in such places as Quarterly West, Columbia, Antioch Review, Harvard Review, storySouth, and Connotation Press.  As an investigative journalist, she reported on the causes of extraordinary violence in LIFE, Third Coast, and D Magazine. She is founder and executive director emeritus of the nonprofit literary center, Gemini Ink (www.geminiink.org), and an associate professor of English at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio.

Click on the soundcloud link to experience Body and Bread, as read by author Nan Cuba:

The word on Body and Bread:

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.
*lifted from goodreads with love