Read this book if you like Miranda July, Kelly Link, Karen Russell, magical realism, love stories, dead cats, your grandmother, and this quote:
“Pretend we are two huge saguaro cactuses, side by side in the rocky ground … Our arms are wrapped around each other’s necks. It is warm out and we are growing bright pink flowers. Our spines prick into one another’s four-hundred-year-old skin and the water inside us seeps out in little beads. We could survive without rain for months. You can’t believe how many stars there are above us, just millions. Everything around us is alive and busy, but all we have to do is stand still. The small birds that make homes in our bodies have left us alone in the dark.”
Publisher Riverhead Trade
Publication Date 2014-05-06
Section New Titles - Paperback / Fiction / All Staff Suggestions / Fiction Suggestions / Melissa L.-O.
Format Paperback
ISBN 9781594632686
Reminiscent of Aimee Bender and Karen Russell—an enthralling new collection that uses the world of the imagination to explore the heart of the human condition.
Major new literary talent Ramona Ausubel combines the otherworldly wisdom of her much-loved debut novel, No One Is Here Except All of Us, with the precision of the short-story form.A Guide to Being Born is organized around the stages of life—love, conception, gestation, birth—and the transformations that happen as people experience deeply altering life events, falling in love, becoming parents, looking toward the end of life. In each of these eleven stories Ausubel’s stunning imagination and humor are moving, entertaining, and provocative, leading readers to see the familiar world in a new way.
In “Atria” a pregnant teenager believes she will give birth to any number of strange animals rather than a human baby; in “Catch and Release” a girl discovers the ghost of a Civil War hero living in the woods behind her house; and in “Tributaries” people grow a new arm each time they fall in love. Funny, surprising, and delightfully strange—all the stories have a strong emotional core; Ausubel’s primary concern is always love, in all its manifestations.
