This Is Salvaged is a collection of nine stories about grief, siblingship, destruction and what emerges from it. Throughout them, Vara illuminates the threads that bind us.... Readers are regaled with tales of extinction and de-extinction, death and survival here and elsewhere.--Hana Rivers "High Country News"
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, amid all the strangeness and lostness of the world.--Sarah Thankam Mathews, author of All This Could Be Different
A poignant collection of stories that glimpse the salvation of human connection in the midst of modern alienation.--Kirkus Reviews, starred review
An anthology that will remind you to cherish life's strange little moments and be in awe of the big ones.--Perri Ormont Blumberg "Men's Journal"
Beautiful...takes us into the lives of women and girls, who often struggle to connect and communicate.--Deepa Fernandes and Emiko Tamagawa, WBUR, "Here and Now"
Fresh and urgent.... Vara's words, frugal and fastidious, are a window into the unholiness of modern life.--Meena Venkataramanan "The Boston Globe"
I finished This Is Salvaged and immediately wanted to reread 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.--Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
Inside each strange but recognizable story in This Is Salvaged you'll find lines that knock you flat and emotions that bend back on themselves.... What led to so many underlines in my copy, though, was Vara's loose philosophy around the roles and connection shared by the women going in and out of her stories, which feeds into zippy, spirited, and touching moments.--Janet Manley "Literary Hub"
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 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.--Lauren Groff, author of The Vaster Wilds and Matrix
The narrator of the title story in this collection is an unappreciated artist who beholds a warming planet and wishes to express that the precariousness of life is, among other things, darkly funny. This thesis propels the stories that follow.... The exuberant optimism of Vara's characters allows the author to approach heavy topics--predatory bosses, globalization, class difference--with levity.-- "The New Yorker"
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.--Elizabeth McCracken, author of The Souvenir Museum
These dazzling stories take a kaleidoscopic and ferociously tender look at loss and what people hold on to or discover in the wake of it. This Is Salvaged is as interested in the aftermath of a breaking point as the break itself, excavating from grief a fragile and honest sense of hope. Vauhini Vara has written a wholly original, insightful, and powerful collection.--Danielle Evans, author of The Office of Historical Corrections
To read Vara's short stories is to briefly inhabit a mind attuned to the fumbling and freedom of having a body.... These stories, similarly, reveal the leaky boundaries between our bodies and the universe, and bare what's vulnerable, and beautiful, underneath.--Valerie Trapp "The Atlantic"
Vara invigorates with emotional insights, whimsy, and a precision with language. It's a remarkable achievement.--Publishers Weekly, starred review
Vara is a master storyteller, but more than that, she is the keeper of grief and shame dealt with in masterful strokes of directness, strangeness, and fearlessness.--Madhushree Ghosh "The Rumpus"
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.--R.O. Kwon "Electric Literature"
Vara's writing is emotional, arresting, chilling, surprising and effortlessly radiant.--Karla J. Strand, Ms. Magazine
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.--Hannah Bae "Datebook, San Francisco Chronicle"
Droll, astute snapshots of human relations.--Keziah Weir "Vanity Fair"
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!--Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-Winning author of Less is Lost
Stories that focus on the sublime and powerful bonds humans forge with one another.--Jessica Blough, Ajay Orona, and Elizabeth Casillas "Alta Journal"