Zazen
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
From the author of the National Book Award longlisted epic The Great Offshore Grounds, here is the debut novel that launched her career—a story of activism, police violence, and white guilt in a not so distant dystopian America.
“An ambitious encapsulation of our modern times, Zazen tackles counterculture hipsters, geology, Buddhism, consumerism, terrorism, veganism, family drama, and, above all, love." —Judges' Citation, PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize
The world is on fire, and Della doesn’t know what, if anything, she should do about it.
The country is poised on the brink of war. Curfews and other restrictions give the police an excuse for violence. Customers at the vaguely vegan cafe where Della is working after dropping out of grad school debate which foreign countries are the best to flee to: Costa Rica? Bali? Della’s parents—former revolutionaries—are more excited at the idea of her brother and his Black wife giving them biracial grandbabies than in engaging in any new actions; her nominally activist coworkers are mostly devoted to planning a massive sex party. Della floats between them, lost and numb.
Then a bomb goes off: some shallow place of capitalistic worship demolished. Inspired, for reasons not entirely clear to herself, Della calls in a second—fake—bomb threat. But a bomb goes off there, too, and soon Della finds herself pulled in by a group of people who, for once, are promising to actually do something. No matter the consequences. Prescient when it was first published, Vanessa Veselka’s debut novel is even more revolutionary now.
A VINTAGE ORIGINAL.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The deeply disaffected young woman narrator of Veselka's taut debut must decide whether to flee a dystopian America or try to endure it, and, in the process maybe help save it a little. Della is a waitress with an obsessive interest in self-immolation, a sharp wit, and a dwindling hope in humanity. When a bomb goes off in an office building in her faceless industrial city's downtown, Della finds that the distant wars the country's been fighting are coming closer to home. At first she considers leaving like many others, but then the chaos becomes attractive to Della and she calls in a series of phony bomb threats around town, taking big delight in watching people scramble from, for instance, a mall-church complex. But when someone starts setting off bombs at places from her list of "targets," Della realizes that she might be part of something bigger than her own absurd protest. Veselka's prose is chiseled and laced with arsenic observations, and though she unleashes some savage social satire, her focus is more on the hypocrisy, heartache, and confusion that drive Della and those around her. But don't be distracted by the chaos and disorder: Veselka makes a case for hope and meaning amid sheer madness.
