Hannah's Pick of the Week: This is Salvaged by Vauhini Vara

Hannah Dove

Oct 31

The married couple wonder aloud about the exact providence of their furniture. It's all recycled material, they tell their friends. It's all sustainable. They go around pointing to the items one by one. This is salvaged, this is salvaged!"

Vauhini Vara, This is Salvaged: Stories

Child, parent, friend, sibling, neighbor, lover—in these stories of uncanny originality, a prize-winning writer pushes intimacy to its limits in prose of unearthly beauty.

A girl and her friend try out telemarketing as a way to get past her brother's death. A competitive sibling tries to rise above the alcoholic mess of her own life to become a loving aunt. A young girl reads the encyclopedia to her elderly neighbor, who is descending into dementia. 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, while seducing the girl working at the homeless shelter. In a world defined by estrangement, where is connection to be found?

This is Salvaged follows people who are swimming through grief, from the young to the old. What makes a person good enough? How do you reach out to another and ask for help? How do you disperse the living from the past? Each story, delectable and bittersweet, pulls on the common thread of humanity that ties us together in close, sometimes claustrophobic ways. The prose is accessible and will let this collection flow by before you're able to feel the sting of the aftermath.

If This is Salvaged: Stories by Vauhini Vara intrigues you, Old Babes in the Woods by Margaret Atwood, American Estrangement by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, and Wednesday's Child by Yiyun Li are all orbiting reads, touching on loss, alienation, and the strangeness of contemporary life. You can listen to Vara below read from her New York Times piece, "My Decade In Google Searches."