Showing results by author "Vanessa Veselka" in All Categories

Vanessa Veselka grew up a child in motion. After her parents split, she'd lived in nine states by the age of seven, eventually landing with her mother in 1970s Greenwich Village. Along the way she became enthralled with a distant part of her identity: her father's ceremonial adoption into the Tlingit, an Alaskan native people of legendary martial prowess. As an adult her childhood memories of Tlingit warrior tales would transform into a quest to understand her own connection to a distant people and their history.

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...

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD NOMINEE A wildly original, cross-country novel that subverts a long tradition of family narratives and casts new light on the mythologies—national, individual, and collective—that drive and define us. On the day of their estranged father’s wedding, half sisters...