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.

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.

Audiobook Table of Contents:
“You Can Find Love Now,” read by Kirby Heyborne with Emily Rankin
“Fresh Water From the Sea,” read by Rebecca Lowman
“Template for a Proclamation to Save the Species,” read by Danny Campbell
“Mother Land,” read by Cassandra Campbell
“Departure Lounge,” read by Kate Rudd
“Remedy,” read by Karissa Vacker
“Club Zeus,” read by Macleod Andrews
“High Desert,” read by Amanda Carlin
“Heaven,” read by Vikas Adam
“The Animal Mummies Wish to Thank the Following,” read by Bruce Mann
“Do Not Save the Ferocious, Save the Tender,” read by Mark Bramhall

In 1939, the families in a remote Jewish village in Romania feel the war close in on them. Their tribe has moved and escaped for thousands of years, but now, there is nowhere else to go. At the suggestion of an eleven-year-old girl and a mysterious stranger who has washed up on the riverbank, the villagers decide to reinvent the world: deny any relationship with the known and start over from scratch. And for years, there is boundless hope. But the real world continues to unfold alongside the imagined one, and soon our narrator – the girl, grown into a young mother – must flee her village to find her husband and save her children, and propel them toward a real and hopeful future.

From the award-winning author of No One Is Here Except All of Us comes an imaginative novel about a wealthy New England family in the 1960s and ’70s that suddenly loses its fortune–and its bearings.

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.

A playful, witty, and resonant novel in which a single mother and her two teen daughters engage in a wild scientific experiment and discover themselves in the process, from the award-winning writer of Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

Teenage sisters Eve and Vera never imagined their summer vacation would be spent in the Arctic, tagging along on their mother’s scientific expedition. But there’s a lot about their lives lately that hasn’t been going as planned, and truth be told, their single mother might not be so happy either.

Now in Siberia with a bunch of serious biologists, Eve and Vera are just bored enough to cause trouble. Fooling around in the permafrost, they accidentally discover a perfectly preserved, four-thousand-year-old baby mammoth, and things finally start to get interesting. The discovery sets off a surprising chain of events, leading mother and daughters to go rogue, pinging from the slopes of Siberia to the shores of Iceland to an exotic animal farm in Italy, and resulting in the birth of a creature that could change the world—or at least this family.

The Last Animal takes readers on a wild, entertaining, and refreshingly different kind of journey, one that explores the possibilities and perils of the human imagination on a changing planet, what it’s like to be a woman in a field dominated by men, and how a wondrous discovery can best be enjoyed with family. Even teenagers.