Description
♦Winner of the 2018 CHAUTAUQUA JANUS PRIZE, celebrating an emerging writer’s single work of short fiction or nonfiction for daring formal and aesthetic innovations that upset and reorder literary conventions, historical narratives and readers’ imaginations.
Growing up in poverty in the American south, Maya yearns to escape and find something better than anything she’s known. “She is so hungry. It is not food, but everything else, the world … What she needs is not on her street with the one-eyed houses. It is not in the patch of trees she once thought was a forest. It is beyond, somewhere she can’t quite imagine.” Brought to vivid and visceral life through Nicole Cuffy’s aching, lyrical prose, Maya’s childhood fascination with anatomy and her adult pursuit of a career in medicine leads her to discover what it means to lose-and what it means to break free.
At times raw and at others melodic and tender, Atlas of the Body is a deeply resonant meditation on hunger and the costs of realizing a dream.
FROM I. METATARSUS
Maya examines her hands. They are small, calloused. The backs of her hands are dry and brown, but the insides are pink, lined with brown-tinged creases. If she looks very closely, she can see her fingerprints. If she flexes all her fingers as hard as she can, she can see the green veins under her skin, the knobs of her bones. She likes the little web of skin between her thumb and her pointer finger. She likes that, no matter how hard she pinches there, it doesn’t really hurt.
