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    Zazen
    Zazen
    Zazen
    Ebook279 pages4 hours

    Zazen

    By Vanessa Veselka

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    Somewhere in Della’s consumptive, industrial wasteland of a city, a bomb goes off. It is not the first, and will not be the last.

    Reactions to the attacks are polarized. Police activity intensifies. Della’s revolutionary parents welcome the upheaval but are trapped within their own insular beliefs. Her activist restaurant co-workers, who would rather change their identities than the world around them, resume a shallow rebellion of hair-dye, sex parties, and self-absorption. As those bombs keep inching closer, thudding deep and real between the sounds of katydids fluttering in the still of the city night, and the destruction begins to excite her. What begins as terror threats called in to greasy bro-bars across the block boils over into a desperate plot, intoxicating and captivating Della and leaving her little chance for escape.

    Zazen unfolds as a search for clarity soured by irresolution and catastrophe, yet made vital by the thin, wild veins of imagination run through each escalating moment, tensing and relaxing, unfurling and ensnaring. Vanessa Veselka renders Della and her world with beautiful, freighting, and phantasmagorically intelligent accuracy, crafting from their shattered constitutions a perversely perfect mirror for our own selves and state.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRed Lemonade
    Release dateMay 22, 2011
    ISBN9781935869146
    Zazen

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    Reviews for Zazen

    4/5

    62 ratings6 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I couldn't put it down, but I am equally sure I didn't 'get' so much of it - but I didn't care. She has such amazing turns of phrase they just made me pause and read the lines over and over again.
    • 4/5
      This novel deserves more attention. It's intriguing both in style and content without being difficult. Try it!
    • 4/5
      She writes really well about the present, which I think is hard to do. One of the central questions in the book is, what's the moral thing to do when a society is corrupt/broken/falling apart... the reader has to try to figure that out along with the narrator. Made me think about the Weather Underground and Merry in American Pastoral.
    • 5/5
      Well I can tell how much this book was marketed to me by the sheer number of my categories I think it fits. Also by the sheer number of people telling me for like a year how amazing it was. So I finally got it together to read ZAZEN and it actually held up to the hype. Exceeded, even. I want to gather my thoughts and say something more but for now I would say, read this, like-minded friends.
    • 3/5
      This novel is set in a police state, presumably the United States, fraught with terrorists and attendant harsh anti-terrorist measures. It begins as a sardonic yet somehow affectionate romp through the contemporary counterculture of wokesters and hipsters as seen through the eyes of a disaffected employee of a vegan restaurant. About halfway through the book, the emphasis shifts to a group of monkeywrenchers (or terrorists, if you will) as they lay plans to strike a major blow against society. I enjoyed the first part of the book more; though the plot thickens and twists nicely into thriller territory, the author also introduces a myriad of new characters who aren't very well developed and whom I found difficult to differentiate. The already substantial vocabulary load from the restaurant of the weird glop the rising generation likes to eat and drink is augmented by an order of magnitude by geological and explosives arcana. And I hope she knows more about geology and explosives than she does about astronomy; she has her protagonists blissing out at the sublimity of the constellation Capricornus--I hope they had a really good telescope, assuming that they're in the Northern Hemisphere--and looking upward at two o'clock in the morning and seeing a 'thin moon', an impossibility. The author is a considerable wordsmith; almost every page has a striking insight or turn of phrase, but Edward Abbey did the second half of this book much better two generations ago.
    • 5/5
      I love this book, and have found it difficult to put it down even now that I've finished it, I’ve dog-eared many pages and the cover already has that “loved” appearance. Zazen is a little-big book, a book of its time, yet it is made from the ancient bones of brave writing — the exquisite storytelling has that special, timeless magic to make this book a classic. Vanessa Veselka’s Della possesses a wry sense of humor that hits its mark with hilarious honesty that can make you laugh and break your heart at the same time in a way that I truly appreciate. Della’s matter-of-fact voice carried me on a journey through a landscape that was both unfamiliar and yet I knew it as home, and accepted it, bombs, Wal-Mart n’ all. At the same time that I feared for Della’s safety and sanity, I knew she was made of sterner stuff, and I knew that I, as the reader, was in good hands. This book will make the faint of heart reader squirm, and the bold reader will adore it for its unique qualities. I will not only recommend the book to anyone who I know will appreciate it, it’s a book that I will give to another reader as a present only because I feel they must read it. Kudos to Vanessa Veselka for writing this beautiful little-big book, and big thank you to Richard Nash & Red Lemonade for publishing such a precious gem!

    Book preview

    Zazen - Vanessa Veselka

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