THIS IS SALVAGED: Stories by Vauhini Vara - Review

 

The characters in finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Vauhini Vara's new book of stories THIS IS SALVAGED (WWNorton) are desperately searching for meaning of their lives through one another.

Pushing intimacy to its limits in prose of unearthly beauty, Vauhini Vara explores the nature of being a child, parent, friend, sibling, neighbor, or lover, and the relationships between self and others. A young girl reads the encyclopedia to her elderly neighbor, who is descending into dementia. A pair of teenagers seek intimacy as phone-sex operators. A competitive sibling tries to rise above the drunken mess of her own life to become a loving aunt. One sister consumes the ashes of another. And, in the title story, an experimental artist takes on his most ambitious project yet: constructing a life-size ark according to the Bible’s specifications. 

In a world defined by estrangement, where is communion to be found? 

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Vauhini Vara’s debut novel, The Immortal King Rao, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics’ Circle’s John Leonard Prize and the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and won the Colorado Book Award. Publications that named it as a notable book of the year include NPR and The New York Times, where Justin Taylor called it “a monumental achievement.” It is being adapted for television and has been published around the English-speaking world, including in India, where it won the Atta Galatta Bangalore Literature Festival Book Prize and the Times of India AutHer Award. It will be followed in September 2023 by a story collection, This is Salvaged, which Lithub and Electric Literature have named as one of the most anticipated books of the year. Vara’s fiction has received an O. Henry Award, as well as honors from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Canada Council for the Arts, MacDowell, and Yaddo.

She is a journalist as well. She began her writing career as a technology reporter at the Wall Street Journal and later launched, edited and wrote for the business section of the New Yorker’s website. Since then, her writing has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Businessweek, and elsewhere. She is a Wired contributing writer and can sometimes be found working as a story editor at the New York Times Magazine. Her journalism has been honored by the Asian American Journalists Association, the South Asian Journalists Association, the International Center for Journalists, the McGraw Center for Business Journalism, the International Journalists’ Programmes, and the National Association of Real Estate Editors.

Vara is a mentor at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s Book Project and the secretary for Periplus, a collective mentoring writers of color. She was named a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Colorado State University for 2023-24. She also sits on the board of the Krishna D. Vara Foundation, which awards an annual scholarship to a graduating high-school student at Mercer Island High School in memory of her sister Krishna, who died of cancer in 2001. Vara was born in Saskatchewan, Canada, as a child of Indian immigrants, and grew up there and in Oklahoma and the Seattle suburbs. She lives in Colorado with her husband, the writer Andrew Altschul, and their son.