Zazen

By Vanessa Veselka
(Red Lemonade, Paperback, 9781935869054, 256pp.)

Publication Date: May 2011

Categories: Literary

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Vanessa Veselka (Portland, OR) has been, at various times, a teenage runaway, a sex-worker, a union organizer, a student of paleontology, an expatriate, an independent record label owner, a train-hopper, a waitress, and a mother. Her work has appeared in bust, bitch, maximum rock ’n’ roll, and elsewhere. Zazen is her first novel.

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Vanessa Veselka is something like a literary comet: bright-burning, far-reaching, rarely seen, and a little dangerous.—Tom Bissell

At turns hilarious, unsettling, and improbably sweet, Veselka's debut is, above all, a highly engaging, and totally unique experience, which will have you re-reading passages and dog-earing pages. But best of all, in the end, Zazen is that rare novel which dares to be hopeful in the face of despair, and succeeds.—Jonathan Evison, author of All About Lulu and West of Here

[A] taut...Veselka's prose is chiseled and laced with arsenic observations...Veselka makes a case for hope and meaning amid sheer madness.—Publishers Weekly