As a Pulitzer Prize finalist, winner of Alta Journal's inaugural Rosebud Award for Best Fiction, and a noted national journalist, Vauhini Vara is used to big attention and large audiences, but in the author’s new collection of stories, This Is Salvaged, Vara is laser-focused on small-scale intimacy and imperfect connection. In conversation with Alta’s California Book Club editor Anita Felicelli, Vara joins Alta Live to discuss her exciting new book, detail her work with The Periplus Collective, an initiative that pairs emerging writers of color with established mentors, and answer your questions.
About the author:
Vauhini Vara is the author of This is Salvaged and The Immortal King Rao, a Pulitzer Prize finalist. She is also a journalist, writing for Wired, The New York Times Magazine, and others. She teaches at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop's Book Project and is the secretary of Periplus.
About the book:
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. In This is Salvaged, 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.•
