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Title: A Guide to Being Born
Author: Ramona Ausubel
Narrator: Cassandra Campbell, Kirby Heyborne
Format: Unabridged
Length: 6 hrs
Language: English
Release date: 05-22-13
Publisher: Dreamscape Media, LLC
Ratings: 3.5 of 5 out of 6 votes
Genres: Fiction, Short Stories & Anthologies
Publisher's Summary:
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.
Critic Reviews:
"Lyrical stories arranged around themes of birth, gestation, conception and love... Ausubel has a gift of language so rich that even the most mundane events are invested with poetry, and many of her characters are in need of all the poetry they can muster." (Kirkus Reviews)
"...a charming, at times precious collection of stories..." (Publishers Weekly)
Members Reviews:
"The horizon, that line drawn by the eye to make an ending where there is not one."
This book is about both the phenomena that the eye draws out of need, and the reality that the eye does not register. It seems in most short story collections, there are ones that speak to me more clearly than others, and this is the case here. However the enchantment of the book conitnues throughout the entire work. This book requires a suspension of that horizon of reality and the ephermal - that which may be too gossamer to be seen in the usual sense. Having given the bossy, rational self over to the experience of the non-physical taking form that can be sensed, these stories are quite transportive.
One of my favorites is the first story, the one I often see cited by reviews. Several grandmothers find themselves on a ship with no memory or knowledge of how they came to be there. Some of them make small talk and some take assertive steps to find a solution. I love that they are always called the grandmothers, and I love Alice, the one who submerges herself in the experience. Early one she suspects she has died.
Another deep favorite is the last story in which people grow love arms. When they love someone, an arm grows. It cannot be willed. It will not respond to lust. Young girls dream of their love arms. The iterations and combinations of a love being on clear display are stunning.
And then I find I really liked the story where a consortium of well known academics gather to hear from a Nobel Laureate who does not come. So the evening starts with each one speaking to their own obsessions and evolves to the point that people add their personal obsessions. Our hero, who has lost his wife ponders the most difficult questions of grief, but not out loud. "Is it braver to allow the sadness of your leaving to spread into each of my bones until it is as big as you were to me? Or it it braver to let you drift out nto what may very well be a brighter, finer place than this and happy to think of your joy there?"
This is the "it" book of the literary journals right now, and they are often a drag. But this book is entitled to its place of admiration and well worth reading.
