Ramona Ausbel’s short story collection, A Guide to Being Born, is a wonderful romp through magical realism, exploring the fabric of life itself. The curtain between life and death is as thin as that between the real and imagined.
The New York Times review says this:
Ausubel is sensitive to our precarious position between safety and peril — locked out of full access to one another’s inner lives, locked into the pitiless machinations of our own biological systems, left certain only of our uncertainties.
The collection opens with “Safe Passage,” a story of a ship adrift in at sea, captained only by hundreds and hundreds of Grandmothers. In “A Chest of Drawers” a father-to-be develops a series of drawers in his chest in which he can store any number of sundries, including his wife’s lipstick. In “Atria,” a high school freshmen blurs the line between truth and lies after she finds herself very pregnant.
Reminiscent of the fantastical and tragic of Ausubel’s first novel, No One Is Here Except All of Us, the characters in A Guide To Being Born are struggling through life-altering events and decisions in extraordinary and unusual ways. Ausubul handles the weaknesses and strengths of her characters with a deft touch, allowing their strangeness to be their salvation.
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