This Is Salvaged

Stories

By: Vauhini Vara

Narrated by: Deepa Samuel

Stories of uncanny originality from a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction

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.

©2023 Vauhini Vara (P)2023 Tantor

Critic reviews

"A poignant collection of stories that glimpse the salvation of human connection in the midst of modern alienation."—Kirkus Reviews

Good Not Great

The main challenged I faced when listening to Vauhini Vara’s This is Salvaged was that I had just finished Eric Walrond’s Tropic Death. Those stories transported me to a different time and place with pitch perfect narration while Vara’s underwhelmed me with their pedestrian prose which seldom sang. Deepa Samuel’s deadpan, drone like narration hurt. I couldn’t tell when one story ended and another began. There are no pauses or slow downs in narration. Only in the last several stories, just as What’s Next, did the stories and narration burn with a fiery intensity. Vara is an accomplished storyteller. I waited months for this collection. I’ll wait more for a better collection.

This book was not a good fit for my ears

Because this is a collection of short stories, it would have been better for ME to read it, probably. There’s no audio cue to signal transition between stories and it’s confusing in that way.