This Is Salvaged: Stories — Vauhini Vara

Winner of the High Plains Book Award

Longlisted for the Story Prize and the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award

One of The New Yorker's Best Books of the Year


"Masterfully makes anew what it feels like to be alive.” -- Jonathan Escoffery, The New York Times Book Review

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.