Zazen felt like the future when it first appeared, but the present also like Veselka had created her own genre just to describe how we were and who we d become. Electric, visionary, I think it will always be a bellwether of a novel. Alexander Chee, author of The Queen of the Night
Zazen is revolutionary. Gorgeously written, deeply intelligent, explosive, it is a vicious and nuanced takedown of the neo-liberal state, and the reactionary, identity-besotted left that opposes it. As forests burn and cities are gentrified and billionaires launch themselves into space, there is no better time for this story of terror and joy and the intoxicating freedom of resisting authority in all its insidious guises. Veselka is a genius, an outsider philosopher for the ages. Cara Hoffman, founding editor, The Anarchist Review of Books
Veselka s prose is chiseled and laced with arsenic observations. . . . Veselka makes a case for hope and meaning amid sheer madness. Publishers Weekly
Veselka honors the complexity of a young, intelligent generation at once confused and overwhelmed, but willing to enact change. . . . Zazen is a satiric examination of the real and perceived boundaries of activism and idealism in twenty-first-century America. Kenyon Review
Powerful. . . . A streaking flash of barbed satire and 21st century malaise. The New York Journal of Books
Vital and explosive, this book is not to be missed. Flavorwire
Zazen has a power beyond the satire and the clever reimagining of today s counterculture trends. It also has heart and soul. The Oregonian
Veselka grabs plot by the lapels and brings it to the forefront of the book without sacrificing the effectiveness of the more ethereal aspects of good fiction. The Millions
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 rereading 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 Lawn Boy
Vanessa Veselka is the author of the novel The Great Offshore Grounds, which won the Oregon Book Awards' Ken Kesey Award for Fiction and was longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award and the novel Zazen, which won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. Her short stories have appeared in Tin House and ZYZZYVA, and her nonfiction in GQ, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, The Atavist, and was included in Best American Essays and the anthology Bitchfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism. She has been, at various times, a teenage runaway, a sex worker, a union organizer, an independent record label owner, a train hopper, a waitress, and a mother. She lives in Portland, OR.
