Anatomy: A Novel

by Shawna Yang Ryan

What does it mean to move from object to agent? Spanning the years between the Clinton era and the Trump presidency, ANATOMY follows an unnamed Asian American performance artist as she awakens to female consciousness, desire, and autonomy. Told through vignettes, the novel traces her efforts to use her body in a radical merging of art and life, exploring the intersections of race, gender, politics, and inheritance. Blurring the boundaries between performance and experience, ANATOMY is an intimate, formally inventive meditation on embodiment and the act of becoming one's own.

Ryan’s gorgeously haunting voice brings us a story that bleeds across every page. Anatomy fearlessly picks at the wounds that create the art, and the art that exposes how thoroughly and tragically human we all are. A breathtaking, aching, and essential read.—Kristy Park Kulski, author of House of Pungsu, and Bram Stoker Award winning editor of Silk & Sinew

“Intimately personal as well as expansive, Anatomy delves into creative identity, performance art, and fractured histories (national, familial, and individual), woven together with Shawna Yang Ryan’s poetic, unsparing language. Transgressive, clear-eyed, mesmerizing!”—Lillian Howan, author of The Charm Buyers

Shawna Yang Ryan has written a character whose voice manages to sound at once obviously schooled and yet plausibly idiomatic—proving that autofiction was always the destiny of Asian American fiction since Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior.—Colleen Lye, Associate Professor of English and Chair of the Asian American Research Center, UC Berkeley

Shawna Yang Ryan is the author of the novels Green Island and Water Ghosts. A former Associate Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, she is the recipient of an American Book Award and other awards for her fiction. She currently works as an editor and writing coach in Northern California.

216 pages, Paperback

Published August 11, 2026

About the author

Shawna Yang Ryan is the author of Green Island (Knopf), an Amazon Best Book of the Month and Boston Globe Pick of the Week, and Water Ghosts (Penguin Press), a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller. A recipient of an American Book Award, she previously served as Director of the Creative Writing Program and Associate Professor of English at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Drawing on nearly two decades as a teacher, she now works as an editor and writing coach in Northern California.