The Vulture

“Ziarnik’s existential nightmare confirms all of our worst fears: that the cost of living is peace of mind. The Vulture expertly plumbs the nature of coincidence and meaning in an often meaningless world, offering, by way of its tightly constructed sentences and insights, the consolation of art.”

—Garrard Conley, author of Boy Erased, Truman Capote Fellow

Somehow both relatable and mysterious, The Vulture is a tightly written story of escalating tension, from its first sentence to its last. I not only couldn’t put it down, I couldn’t stop talking about it when I did. Ziarnik expertly blurs the lines between who we are with the lights on and those dark, frantic corners of our obsessive minds. It’s been a long time since I’ve read anything that so precisely captures how it feels to be alive right now, right here, today.”

—Anne Corbitt, author of Rules for Lying, John and Renee Grisham Fellow

“With fight-tight prose and a mastery of nuance reminiscent of Hitchcock, Ziarnik uses the metaphor of a vulture’s sudden and unexplained presence in the neighborhood to evoke the steady escalation of terror the world experienced in the Covid pandemic of 2020.”

—Melanie Sumner, author of How to Write a Novel, National Endowment of the Arts Fellow