Ramona Ausubel

Eleven short stories chart the cycle of transformation from love to conception to gestation to birth.

Stories

A Guide to Being Born

“Excellent and peculiar… Ausubel’s imagination…wants to offer consolation for how ghastly things can get, a type of healing that only reading can provide. All 11 of these stories are deeply involving.” –New York Times Book Review “Funny, endearing short stories…Each tale looks to the future in its own particular, touching way.” –Harper’s Bazaar An inventive story collection that spans the globe as it explores love, childhood, and parenthood with an electric mix of humor and emotion. Acclaimed for the grace, wit, and magic of her novels, Ramona Ausubel introduces us to a geography both fantastic and familiar in eleven new stories, some of them previously published in The New Yorker and The Paris Review. Elegantly structured, these stories span the globe and beyond, from small-town America and sunny Caribbean islands to the Arctic Ocean and the very gates of Heaven itself. And though some of the stories are steeped in mythology, they remain grounded in universal experiences: loss of identity, leaving home, parenthood, joy, and longing. Crisscrossing the pages of Awayland are travelers and expats, shadows and ghosts. A girl watches as her homesick mother slowly dissolves into literal mist. The mayor of a small Midwestern town offers a strange prize, for stranger reasons, to the parents of any baby born on Lenin's birthday. A chef bound for Mars begins an even more treacherous journey much closer to home. And a lonely heart searches for love online--never mind that he's a Cyclops. With her signature tenderness, Ramona Ausubel applies a mapmaker's eye to landscapes both real and imagined, all the while providing a keen guide to the wild, uncharted terrain of the human heart.

Awayland

When an isolated Jewish village in Romania is threatened by war in 1939, the suggestions of a young child and a mysterious stranger who has washed up on the riverbank compels the community to reinvent itself while completely detaching from the known world, a creative plan that involves disturbing reassignments of jobs and families. 25,000 first printing.

No One is Here Except All of Us

"A timely, sophisticated tale [that] explores what happens when a charmed life loses its luster." -O Magazine From the award-winning author of the new collection Awayland, an imaginative novel about a wealthy New England family in the 1960s and '70s that suddenly loses its fortune--and its bearings. An NPR Best Book of the Year Labor Day, 1976, Martha's Vineyard. Summering at the family beach house along this moneyed coast of New England, Fern and Edgar--married with three children--are happily preparing for a family birthday celebration when they learn that the unimaginable has occurred: There is no more money. More specifically, there's no more money in the estate of Fern's recently deceased parents, which, as the sole source of Fern and Edgar's income, had allowed them to live this beautiful, comfortable life despite their professed anti-money ideals. Quickly, the once-charmed family unravels. In distress and confusion, Fern and Edgar are each tempted away on separate adventures: she on a road trip with a stranger, he on an ill-advised sailing voyage with another woman. The three children are left for days with no guardian whatsoever, in an improvised Neverland helmed by the tender, witty, and resourceful Cricket, age nine. Brimming with humanity and wisdom, humor and bite, and imbued with both the whimsical and the profound, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty is a story of American wealth, class, family, and mobility, approached by award-winner Ramona Ausubel with a breadth of imagination and understanding that is fresh, surprising, and exciting.

Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

A Novel

Last Animal

10 Stories for the Back to School Season

Fairyland

You Can Find Love Now

Roemenië, 1939. Voor een afgelegen joods dorpje komt de oorlog steeds dichterbij. Om het dreigende gevaar af te wenden en zichzelf te beschermen besluiten de dorpelingen alle banden met de 'oude' wereld te verbreken. Door de ogen van Lena, een jonge vrouw, zien we hoe de dorpelingen hun lot in eigen hand nemen: ze vergeten de tijd en de geschiedenis, en sluiten hun dorp, dat op een schiereiland ligt, compleet van de buitenwereld af. Maar uiteindelijk haalt de realiteit hen in.Lena moet haar dorp ontvluchten en begint aan een helse tocht door Europa om aan de oorlog te ontsnappen. Wat moet zij opofferen om haar leven en dat van haar kinderen te redden, op weg naar een hoopvolle toekomst?Ramona Ausubel betovert de lezer met haar woorden maar brengt hem ook in verwarring. Er is hier niemand, behalve wij allemaal is een fabelachtige, bij vlagen hartverscheurende roman.

Er is hier niemand, behalve wij allemaal

Seit Generationen sind sie geflohen, durch Wüsten, über Ozeane und Berge. Nun sind sie angekommen im tiefsten karpatischen Wald, in Zalischik. Es ist 1939, es ist Krieg, und es gibt keinen Ort mehr, an den sie noch fliehen können. Nur eines kann ihnen helfen, ihre Fantasie. Deshalb folgen die Bewohner von Zalischik der Idee eines elfjährigen Mädchens - sie tun einfach so, als gäbe es die Wirklichkeit nicht mehr. Ihre Fantasie und ein unbändiger Wille lassen sie das Schicksal leugnen und alles neu erfinden. Töchter bekommen neue Väter, der Bäcker wird zum Schreiner. So vergehen die Jahre, und die Hoffnung auf Rettung wächst. Doch schließlich bricht die Grausamkeit der Welt in ihr Dorf ein – und für das kleine Mädchen, aus dem eine junge Frau geworden ist, beginnt eine Flucht, die sie weit hinaus in die Fremde treibt. Funkelnde, von seltener Vorstellungskraft getragene Prosa über ein märchenhaftes Dorf und das Erwachsenwerden in außergewöhnlichen Zeiten.

Ramona Ausubel

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