A Guide To Being Born: Stories

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Ramona Ausubel combines the otherworldly wisdom of her much loved debut novel, with the precision of the short story form. Organised through the stages of life: love, conception, pregnancy, birth, childhood and the transformations as people experience love, parenthood and death. In each of the these 11stories, Ausubel's imagination and humour lead the reader to see the world in a different way.

Reviews

"Each story in this collection finds a way to record the tensions between the corporeal and the invisible, the forces that animate us but ultimately cant be dissected, our anti-anatomies. The dismay of coming to the final page is easily combated by following the example of Ausubels characters and beginning all over again."The New York Times Book Review

Aggressively imaginative.The New York Times

"Lyrical stories arranged around themes of birth, gestation, conception and love. . . . Ausubel has a gift of language so rich that even the most mundane events are invested with poetry, and many of her characters are in need of all the poetry they can muster."Kirkus

"Ausubel is a master stylist of vibrant, concise prose, and these stories, with love most often at their cores, can be appreciated for that alone."Booklist

"These stories reminded me of branches full of cherry blossoms: fresh, delicate, beautiful, expressive, otherworldly. I eagerly read from one story to the next."Aimee Bender

Author Bio

Ramona Ausubelis a graduate of the MFA program at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author ofAwayland,Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty, andNo One Is Here Except All of Us. Her work has been published inThe New Yorker,One Story,The Paris Review Daily,Best American Fantasy, and elsewhere, and has received special mentions inThe Best American Short StoriesandThe Best American Nonrequired Reading. She has been longlisted for The Frank O'Connor Short Story Prize, and a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions award andthe Pushcart Prize.