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Also by Ramona Ausubel:

Awayland, March 2019
Trade Size / e-Book (reprint)
Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty, June 2016
Hardcover
A Guide To Being Born, May 2013
Hardcover / e-Book

A GUIDE TO BEING BORN
By: Ramona Ausubel

Riverhead
May 2013
On Sale: May 7, 2013
208 pages
ISBN: 1594487952
EAN: 9781594487958
Kindle: B00AEBEW2C
Hardcover / e-Book
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Fiction Family Life

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 toBeing 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.

Media Buzz

Morning Edition - June 4, 2013