A Guide to Being Born

In each of her eleven stories, Ramona Ausubel uses her inimitable style, her fantastical ambition, and her gift for the imaginative to expose the fundamentals of the human condition as she charts the cycle of love from conception to gestation to birth.

A pregnant teenage girl believes she will give birth to any number of strange animals rather than a human baby; an expectant father wakes to find that small drawers have appeared in the center of his chest; a girl discovers the...
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In each of her eleven stories, Ramona Ausubel uses her inimitable style, her fantastical ambition, and her gift for the imaginative to expose the fundamentals of the human condition as she charts the cycle of love from conception to gestation to birth.

A pregnant teenage girl believes she will give birth to any number of strange animals rather than a human baby; an expectant father wakes to find that small drawers have appeared in the center of his chest; a girl discovers the ghost of a Civil War hero living in the woods behind her house; the parents of a severely disabled daughter must decide whether to perform a surgery that will keep her from growing; two siblings take their place in a family story that is mostly ficitonal. As we read A Guide to Being Born, we travel through the stages of life and all the transformations that occur. These stories are about the moments when we pass from one part of life into another, about the love that finds us in the dark and pulls us, finally, through.

'Delightful . . . startling.' Minneapolis Star Tribune

'Galvanizing and almost uplifting . . . To call these stories ambitious is wholly accurate; Ausubel is constantly pushing for her characters to be more, to feel more, to experience more . . . A gloriously eccentric vision.' The Boston Globe

'Enthralling . . . What gives A Guide to Being Born its splendor is the way Ausubel uses her outlandish lens to magnify a very recongnizable strain of love and longing.' San Francisco Chronicle