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A Guide to Being Born
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A Guide to Being Born
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A Guide to Being Born
Audiobook6 hours

A Guide to Being Born

Written by Ramona Ausubel

Narrated by Cassandra Campbell

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

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Currently unavailable

Currently unavailable

About this audiobook

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.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateMay 2, 2013
ISBN9781624065163
Unavailable
A Guide to Being Born
Author

Ramona Ausubel

Ramona Ausubel is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of No One Is Here Except All of Us. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, One Story, The Paris Review Daily, Best American Fantasy, and elsewhere, and has received special mentions in The Best American Short Stories and The 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 and the Pushcart Prize.

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Reviews for A Guide to Being Born

Rating: 3.9126984476190474 out of 5 stars
4/5

63 ratings25 reviews

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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This sometimes charming, sometimes frustrating collection of stories from Ramona Ausubel navigates a surreal territory of dream logic, plumbing deep wells of emotion and human fragility while occasionally falling victim to its own preciousness. These stories are full of intriguing conceits - the world in which those who experience love grow a new arm is perfectly poetic and ripe with potential - but Ausubel's writing can seem too infatuated with its inventions, unintentionally holding the reader at a distance. Her occasional so-clever turns of phrase can be uncomfortable reminders of the writer's presence, when the reader might otherwise prefer a lighter touch.Fortunately, these are fairly minor quibbles, and this collection has a lot to recommend it. At its best the writing is poetic and fluid, and the creativity behind many of the stories offers a bracing jolt. If Ausubel continues to explore such charged emotional terrain while dialing back some of these "writerly" pitfalls, I'll enjoy following her work.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A decidedly unusual, sometimes fantastical collection of short stories. Each unique and compelling in it's own way.Normally I am not a short story reader, but these kept me engaged and I remember thinking that several could beexpanded into a novel. The division of the stories into categories that were sometimes not immediately obvious asbelonging in that category caused one to rethink your first impression. Thought provoking!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Fantastic... her writing is alien and beautiful. As others have noted, the stories are surreal and defamiliarizing. Allegory drives her writing. The poems come packaged as realism, but they unfold in ways that challenge the conventions of realism in interesting ways. The poetic language is quite stunning. Really hard to compare her to anyone else.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Ausubel's short story collection guides the reader through birth, gestation, conception, and love. While the book is divided into these thematic stages, each story explores the topic without heavy-handedness. She guides the reader into bizarre, sometimes even surreal realms, and the narrative voice is sincere, rich, and poetic.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Ramona Ausubel's first collection of short stories is imaginative, weird, and magical. I was surprised by how different it felt from her novel ("No One Is Here More Than All of Us"); her stories are more Etgar Keret and less Jonathan Safran Foer. My favorite story was about people who grow a new arm each time they fall in love.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I don't always read a short story collection straight through; if fun titles catch my attention I'm liable to begin with those stories. Ausubel's titles didn't seduce me, so I read this book straight through. And though I admired some of the writing in the first few stories, I can't say I actually liked them. But then things started getting weird in a wonderful way, and I liked every story thereafter. I wonder if I'd read the stories in a different order if I'd have appreciated the early ones more.I love the surreal stories here--a man's chest becomes a "chest of drawers" during his wife's pregnancy; a girl plays catch with a long-dead Confederate general--but I think my favorite story here might be the one that makes magic out of ingredients as workaday as a grocery clerk-turned-dental assistant and another grocery clerk ready to turn into herself.The eleven stories in this collection are divided into sections: Birth, Gestation, Conception and Love. This added another dimension to some of the stories that weren't obvious fits in their categories and inspired me to think about them in a way that made my reading experience richer.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Strikingly original explorations of (post-)humanity. Emotionally charged, honest, haunting and hilarious all at once. The best collection of stories I've read all year.Highly recommended.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Many of these stories are strange and unsettling. There is definitely a surreal quality to this collection (as the cover art suggests). I found Ausubel's style to be unique and compelling, and I enjoyed this collection overall. As is often the case with short story collections, some of these stories were significantly better than others, but all of them were worth reading.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Delicately weird stories, yet very affecting. Fans of George Saunders or Manuel Gonzales may enjoy these stories as well. I love how they centered on a theme (conception, birth, etc.), but in a subtle way that avoids heavy-handedness. Would definitely recommend to a friend.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I'm not going to lie. I think this has been the oddest book I have ever read. That being said, I still enjoyed some of the stories in it and the author definitely got me feeling some things for the characters in her stories. I would recommend this book to adults only. 3.5 out of 5 stars.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A book by a new-to-me author that I may not have picked up if not for a fortuitous Goodreads giveaway win. A collection of eleven short stories with peculiar leanings. Lyrical. The book is split into four parts -- birth, gestation, conception, and love. Curious how these stories fit within these prearranged sections? Me too.

    Contents:

    Safe Passage*
    Poppyseed*
    Atria*
    Chest of Drawers*
    Welcome To Your Life And Congratulations
    Catch and Release*
    Saver
    Snow Remote
    The Ages
    Magniloquence
    Tributaries*


    *Some time has passed before I read the bulk of this book and these are the stories that left the biggest impressions on me. Death. Family. Trama. Birth. Ghosts. Love.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    One of the most outstanding short story collections I have read! Each story is surreal, uncomfortable and speaks profoundly to the biological turning points in life - death, pregnancy, birth and love. I just finished it and I'm going to read it again.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A Guide to Being Born: Stories are a group of short stories that are divided into four parts: Birth, Gestation, Conception, and Love. They are the trippiest and metaphorical bunch of short stories I've ever read. However, they were really good. I loved Ramona Ausubel's prose. She had a psychedelic way of writing.

    My favorites were Atria and Saver. Atria is about a young girl who, after being raped, believes she's going to give birth to a cacophony of animals. I believe it was an extreme reaction of PTSD. Saver tells the very beginnings of a girl who wants more for herself and a boy who finally got his dream job as a dental assistant. Snow Remote was also really good. It mostly about the lies we tell loved ones to keep them going might actually hinder them instead.

    The last story, Tributaries, was chocked full of symbolism. In this world, people who truly fall in love grow an extra arm. It was crazy but sweet. That's really how I could describe this entire book: weird but poignant.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Ramona Ausubel knows how to leave things out. Her stories all start in the middle and mostly end in the middle, with much happening in between. Each story leaves me wanting more, but satisfied at the same time. Some are disturbing, some are inspiring, but all are worth the reading.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    There are certainly collections of short stories out there that are more mystical, more magical, but few of them hit me with such clarity as Ausubel's do. Her characters are real people, with both very real and very unreal conflicts, and her attention to words make it more and more difficult for me to determine the difference between them. This is a compliment unlike any I have ever been able to give before.:The classifications of stories: Birth, Gestation, Conception, and Love will likely want to make me reread this collection from time to time, to pick up new subtleties in the stories surrounding what I consider to be a backward timeline."Catch and Release," "Poppyseed," and "Saver" are my favorites, for incredibly different reasons.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Ausubel offers up a variant of Expressionism, setting her stories in pleasantly recognisable yet indefinite surroundings (across town? other side of the country?), then interjecting the grotesque as a means of drawing attention to familiar yet unplumbed experience. Grotesque in that usage of Sherwood Anderson rather than any trope of horror fiction, though there is some semblance of the weird tale. I'm uncertain Ausubel would acquiesce to Expressionism as descriptive, but I take as hallmark of that tradition the outward manifestation of inner states, and a strong influence of that approach underlies every one of the stories here.It's tempting to frame each story as a thought experiment in which Ausubel ponders a situation -- for instance, the ways adults react to the death of a loved one -- and then refines her thoughts into a very specific scenario -- to pursue this example: the ways middle-class Americans react to loss on the part of someone else, as when someone we love experiences a dear loss, but when the death itself isn't directly personal for us -- and then pivots ninety degrees in her choice of setting or mise-en-scene, evoking the emotions and social dynamics of that central situation but clothing them in the absurd, the whimsical, even the repugnant. Put this way it sounds far too clever and abstract: Ausubel's storytelling is anything but that, these stories are crystalline, the dialogue and description flow smoothly and the reading experience is almost effortless. This is where the Expressionism helps to pause the reader, slow the forward progress, for the events or situations described so languidly and fondly are often in fact jarring and uncomfortable. I think the effect is deliberate, but is only that, effect: the intent to draw attention to something either ineffable, or if described directly, too easily passed over as overly familiar. The example of adults reacting to the loss on the part of someone they love, but which loss is only dimly felt themselves, is the basis for "Welcome to Your Life and Congratulations". A boy grieves the sudden death of his beloved cat, and grieves more keenly the unsatisfactory support on the part of his parents. It's as though Ausubel observed the myriad ways we simultaneously support those we love who are dealing with loss ... and inexplicably and perhaps unavoidably make things worse (without knowing it, even to shockingly callous extremes). Suggesting it is universal, this tension, and is often rooted in the fact that life goes on, both for those grieving and those who love them, if in different ways and at different tempi. These are commonplace questions, important ones even, but I think their emotional impact would be deadened if asked in so direct and flat a manner. Ausubel's evocation of that dilemma is memorable and metaphorically apt, itself disturbing without being obscene.A similar silver thread traces through the other ten stories collected in A Guide to Being Born, leaving an impression of distillation: inner emotion and social dynamics captured in diorama, and a curious key provided for each miniature door.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The content of collections such as this are always hit-or-miss with me. Because the stories are so short, it seems like they either strike a personal chord with me or are easily forgettable. The stories in A Guide to Being Born were about half and half. Sometimes, I was left wondering what point Ausubel was trying to convey. Other stories, I loved for their combination of magical realism and details of everyday contemporary life. All, however, were intriguing and thought-provoking.The ones that stood out: While the opening story, "Safe Passage," was fascinating simply for its unusualness and dreamlike surrealism, the next story, "Poppyseed," was strikingly bittersweet. "Chest of Drawers" was perhaps my favorite, exploring gender roles and one couple's relationship from the male's perspective as he watches his wife's body change with her first pregnancy. I enjoyed reading "Magniloquence" the most, as I could easily connect it to the world of academia of which I am on the edge. It would be hilarious to see my professors in the story's scenario!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    You CAN judge a book by its cover. Perhaps that's not fair to Ausubel, whose book stands on merits far beyond its colorful, fantastic cover. But that's what first attracted me to this book, and happily, the contents within proved to be every bit as fantastic and engaging.I was enchanted by the opening tale of a ship carrying a cargo of puzzled grandmothers. Where were they? How had they gotten there? Where were they going? The dream haze of the story slowly clears as one of the grandmothers recognizes and embraces her journey.I also loved Magniloquence, which features an auditorium of professors waiting for a speaker to arrive. They wait and wait, and as they wait, inhibitions are shed and speeches are improvised and many cookies are surreptitiously eaten. Love is at the core of each of these stories, and in most cases, that love is sure and calm and gentle. And sometimes it is odd, and sometimes oddly compelling, as in Poppyseed, when two parents employ unorthodox means to honor their disabled daughter.Ausubel's writing is exquisite. Enter this book with an open mind and enjoy the strange and moving beauty.I received a copy of this book through GoodReads First Reads.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This book of short stories is interesting, well-written, and is very imaginative. In the first story we find grandmothers who have found themselves suddenly on a ship in the middle of the ocean. With no one else on the ship. This story focuses on one grandmother over the others and how she views the rest of them and they all deal with what has happened. There is another story about a professor who recently lost his wife. Now he is trying to find his place in the world without her there to help him at some of the social functions which he has to go to. He finds it hard to find who he is by himself and not as part of a team. All of the stories are based around birth, death, and love. I found each of the stories to be fantastical and yet still have a sense of realism to them. I enjoyed reading Ausubel's stories, but for some reason I find that the more I think about what I read I don't like them. Not to say they aren't good, because the writing is phenomenal. They just are not my cup of tea.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Ramona Ausubel covers the spectrum of life with a creative style worth reading. I began the book in fits and starts but found myself drawn into it, looking forward to each new tale until I was done, then wanting more. Well worth the read!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Very funny and almost a poem rather than a group of stories, this collection is fresh and delicately written but in no way fragile. While I enjoyed the weird spaces that she explores narratively, I found myself continuously going back to lines and images that Ausubel created, like I would in a long poetic piece, and even reading them aloud to other people. What a compact treat this book proved to be.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A Guide To Being Born by Ramona AusubelIn eleven stories author Ramona Ausubel depicts moments of conception, birth, and death in vivid detail. Special circumstances propel the actions of her characters. Amazing moments of humor emerge.It takes determination to read just one at a time though that is probably the best way to appreciate them. Each reader will find favorites. If pressed I'd mention these three: "The Ages," a gentle story; "Magniloquence," a wonderful spoof; "Catch and Release," a miniature novel that would make a fine film.This is a book to keep within arms reach, rereading brings rewards.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    If you like Karen Russell, this short story collection is right up your ally. I enjoyed most of the stories. Some of them were a little twisted, but good. I have yet to finish all the stories in this book yet, but I know it will call to me again when I can't sleep.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I love short stories as a medium, and if you're not sure about short stories, you might really like this book. It's split up into parts that all have a theme, so they feel more like chapters to a novel than short stories.

    ... that's if you can handle the weirdness. This book is weird, but not weird in the way that I expected. It's well-crafted, so the weirdness feels normal. As a reader, you become accustomed to Ausubel's other-worldliness.

    I read this book in about a day - I found this collection really absorbing, and overall there was only one short story that I really didn't enjoy so much.

    If you like suburban strangeness, if you like short stories, if you like surrealism and magical realism, and you're not afraid of bodies or body parts, this might be a good choice for you.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    An absolutely fascinating collection of stories. I found that it started off really strong in the fantasy realm, and waned a bit in the middle, but all of the stories were interesting and some of them were were really beautiful.