Vauhini Vara has worked as a journalist and an editor for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and the New York Times Magazine. Her fiction has been honored by the O. Henry Prize and the Rona JaffeFoundation. Her first novel, The Immortal King Rao, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and won the Atta Galatta–Bangalore Literature Festival Book Prize for fiction as well as the JK Paper–Times of India AutHER Award for best debut.
<p style="margin: 6px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-position: 0px 0px; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; line-height: 24px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif;">In a world defined by estrangement, where is communion to be found? The characters in <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: 0px 0px;">This Is Salvaged</em> search fervently for meaning through one another:</p><p style="margin: 6px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-position: 0px 0px; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; line-height: 24px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif;">A young girl reads the encyclopedia to her elderly neighbor who is descending into dementia…</p><p style="margin: 6px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-position: 0px 0px; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; line-height: 24px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif;">A pair of teenagers seek intimacy as phone-sex operators…</p><p style="margin: 6px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-position: 0px 0px; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; line-height: 24px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif;">One sister consumes the ashes of another…</p><p style="margin: 6px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-position: 0px 0px; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; line-height: 24px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif;">And, in the title story, an experimental artist takes on his most ambitious project: constructing a life-size ark according to the Bible’s specifications…</p><p style="margin: 6px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-position: 0px 0px; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; line-height: 24px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif;">In stories that are wise and funny, beautiful and strange, Vauhini Vara-author of the award-winning <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: 0px 0px;">The Immortal King Rao</em>, and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize-writes with compassion, but without sentimentality, about loss and longing and attempting to find hope in the midst of grief.</p>
