![This is Salvaged](/sites/www.wisconsinbookfestival.org/files/styles/event_image/public/media/this%20is%20salvaged_art.jpg?itok=1Tt4vsCZ)
This Is Salvaged
This Is Salvaged is a collection of stories of uncanny originality by a prize-winning writer who pushes intimacy to its limits in prose of unearthly beauty.
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.
Vauhini Vara
![Vauhini Vara](/sites/www.wisconsinbookfestival.org/files/styles/medium/public/media/vauhini%20vara_c_andrew%20altschul.jpg?itok=HuMSTVXY)
Vauhini Vara has been a reporter and editor for the Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and the New York Times Magazine, and is the prize-winning author of The Immortal King Rao.