Vauhini Vara with Sonora Jha

Vauhini Vara, author of the Pulitzer Prize nominated novel The Immortal King Rao, returns to the store to discuss her story collection This Is Salvaged with local author and friend of the store Sonora Jha. Pushing intimacy to its limits in prose of unearthly beauty, This Is Salvaged explores the nature of being a child, parent, friend, sibling, neighbor, or lover, and the relationships between self and others. 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’s debut novel, The Immortal King Rao, was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, shortlisted for the National Book Critics’ Circle’s John Leonard Prize and the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and named a notable book of the year by publications including The New York Times, where Justin Taylor called it “a monumental achievement.” Her story collection, This is Salvaged, was named one of the most anticipated books of the year by Lithub, Electric Literature, and others. Vara is a journalist and editor as well, with work published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. She is a Wired contributing writer and can sometimes be found working as a story editor at the New York Times Magazine. She has won journalism honors from the International Center for Journalists, the McGraw Center for Business Journalism, the Asian American Journalists Association, and others. She studied creative writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her fiction has received an O. Henry Award, as well as honors from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Canada Council for the Arts, MacDowell, and Yaddo. Her essay “Ghosts” was anthologized in Best American Essays 2022. Vara is a mentor at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s Book Project and the secretary for Periplus, a collective mentoring writers of color. Sonora Jha is the author of the novels The Laughter (2023) and Foreign (2013) and the memoir How To Raise A Feminist Son: A Memoir and Manifesto (2021). The Laughter has earned rave reviews from The New York Times, The New Yorker, India Today, and The Seattle Times and received starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, Bookpage and others. Sonora was formerly a journalist covering crime, politics, and culture for the Times of India and for East Magazine, Singapore. She moved to the United States to earn a Ph.D. in Political Communication. Dr. Jha's essays and public appearances have featured in The New York Times, on BBC, and in several anthologies. She is a professor of journalism at Seattle University and also teaches creative writing for Hugo House, Hedgebrook Writers’ Retreat, Creative Nonfiction, and Seattle Public Library.

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Website: https://go.evvnt.com/2022327-0

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