This Is Salvaged: Stories by Vauhini Vara

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.