This Is Salvaged: Stories
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Longlisted for The Story Prize
A New Yorker Best Book of 2023 • A New York Public Library Best Book of 2023 • The Frontlist, Adam Morgan's Substack, Favorite Book of 2023 • A Publishers Weekly Best Fiction of 2023 • A Best Book of Fall 2023 by Bustle.
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? The characters in This Is Salvaged, unmoored in turbulence, are searching fervently for meaning, through one another.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The stories in this striking collection from Vara (The Immortal King Rao) depict protagonists yearning for connection. "The Irates," the bracingly frank opener, follows Swati, 14, whose older brother has just died from cancer. She takes refuge from her grieving family with her friend Lydia at their favorite Chinese restaurant in Seattle. There, a man named Orlando recruits them to work as telemarketers (the girls tell him they're 18). After they work for a while selling magazines, they compete to be selected for Orlando's new phone sex venture. The girls' fearlessness and yearning is palpable, and their dialogue is hilarious ("People don't talk about labial sweat," Swati says to Lydia, who responds, "that's true"). In "You Are Not Alone," an eight-year-old girl flies to Orlando from Seattle to stay with her father while her mother is hospitalized for a mental breakdown. He picks her up at the airport with a woman who says she's the girl's stepmother, and while the three are on a kayaking trip, the girl glimpses an alligator and allows the stepmother to paddle in its direction without telling her about it. The smart and playful title story follows a sculptor named Marlon who's known for installations that aren't meant to last. When a child topples Marlon's large-scale sandcastle in a museum gallery, the parents are mortified, not realizing the work is meant to be about what happens following the end of the world, "after we had all been atomized and wind-scattered." Vara invigorates with emotional insights, whimsy, and a precision with language. It's a remarkable achievement.
