★ 07/10/2023
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. (Sept.)
"Vauhini Vara is on a roll...She’s back with a short-story collection that probes the relationships between people, observing humanity in multiple stages of life with humor and keen awareness."
San Francisco Chronicle - Hannah Bee
"In these tales, Vara has captured the fantasies, griefs and longings of life. From keen-eyed girlhood to delusional middle-age, the characters reach for more than is possible, falter, then reach for more. This Is Salvaged is a book for readers who need clarity and hope—that is to say: everybody. Read it!"
"These dazzling stories take a kaleidoscopic and ferociously tender look at loss and what people hold onto or discover in the wake of it. This is Salvaged is frank enough to introduce its characters at their strangest and most vulnerable but is as interested in the aftermath of a breaking point as the break itself, excavating from grief a fragile and honest sense of hope. Vara has written a wholly original, insightful, and powerful collection."
"I finished This is Salvaged and immediately wanted to re-read it. What a ride. Vauhini Vara's writing is immersive, yielding stories that are clever and surprising, heartbreaking and laugh-out-loud funny. A brilliant, deeply satisfying collection."
"A haunting, moving, and wise story collection that leads us to and through the blood-slippery true nature of mourning, commitment, sisterhood, mothering, love, and death, amidst all the strangeness and lostness of the world."
"This collection of stories is everything. From girlhood to grief, it explores intimacy, relationships, loss, motherhood, aloneness and alienation. Vara’s writing is emotional, arresting, chilling, surprising and effortlessly radiant."
Ms. Magazine - Karla Strand
"Vara illuminates the threads that bind us...Readers are regaled with tales of extinction and de-extinction, death and survival here and elsewhere."
High Country News - Hana Rivers
"Stories that focus on the sublime and powerful bonds humans forge with one another."
Alta Journal - Jessica Blough
"Vara’s The Immortal King Rao , a show-stopping novel about a Dalit immigrant who becomes extremely powerful, and about his child, was one of my favorite books that published in 2022, and this story collection promises to be at least as good. I first read a story from this collection, “I, Buffalo,” a decade ago in Tin House. It’s a heartbreaking, somehow very funny story about alcoholism, buffalos, and metamorphosis, one I must have reread a dozen times."
Electric Literature - R.O. Kwon
"The stories in Vauhini Vara's This Is Salvaged are brilliant, entirely human, abidingly strange. She is one of our most inventive writers of fiction, as well as visionary, with a gift for writing about grief both extraordinary and ordinary. This Is Salvaged is unforgettable."
"Vauhini Vara’s stunning and imaginative debut novel, The Immortal King Rao , made quite a splash this year. It garnered rave reviews! It was a finalist for the Center for Fiction’s prestigious First Novel Prize! How exciting for us, then, that her short story collection is coming out in 2023. She’s a writer who packs a punch, and personally, I’m excited to see what magic she can conjure in the condensed form. Although we don’t know much about yet, one thing is certain: it’s something to look forward to."
Literary Hub Most Anticipated Books of 2023 - Katie Yee
"It takes tremendous courage and wit to look with wonder at the darkest, most shameful places in the human heart and make them hilarious, tender, and deeply moving; Vauhini Vara, with her grand-scale compassion and moral complexity in This is Salvaged , can do this magic with astonishing ease. I've been a fan since I read the story "I, Buffalo" years ago, and am so glad to (finally!) have a collection of Vara's stories in hand to admire and love."
★ 2023-06-21The Immortal King Rao (2022), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction.
In “The Irates,” a girl grieving the death of her brother tries to work at a Seattle phone sex hotline. “I, Buffalo” follows a high-achieving woman, recently fired from her law firm and struggling with substance abuse, who tries to be a good aunt. The protagonist of “This Is Salvaged” is an experimental artist who attempts to construct a replica of Noah’s Ark in Seattle with the help of a group of men from a Christian homeless shelter. In “You Are Not Alone,” a girl celebrating her eighth birthday meets her father’s new wife in the Orlando airport. The prose in this wide-ranging collection flows seamlessly, one rhythmic sentence after another. The stories range in perspective, going from an intimate first person to a distant third person that only identifies the protagonist as “the girl.” Some stories are formally inventive. “Unknown Unknowns,” the shortest inclusion, is a five-paragraph sketch of a woman’s relationship with her son and a meditation on truths and untruths. “The Hormone Hypothesis” unfolds primarily as a conversation between two women. “The Eighteen Girls” tells a tragic story of sisterhood and loss through segments ostensibly about different girls (“the first girl,” “the second girl,” etc.). Motifs reemerge across the collection’s pages: repellant parts of the body (sweat and dried up dead skin), girlhood, divorce, faith. If the collection could be said to have a theme, it would be human relationships: those between best friends, aunts and nieces, lovers, mothers and sons, sisters, daughters and fathers. Although many of the stories dwell in the realm of alienation, they generally end on a note of redemption, however small. The reader emerges from these stories contemplative but not pessimistic.
A poignant collection of stories that glimpse the salvation of human connection in the midst of modern alienation.
