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. Among these stories is ‘Atria,’ in which 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. In ‘Tributaries,’ people grow a new arm each time they fall in love.
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“Each story in this collection finds a way to
record the tensions between the corporeal and the invisible, the forces that
animate us but ultimately can’t be dissected, our anti-anatomies. The dismay of
coming to the final page is easily combated by following the example of
Ausubel’s characters and beginning all over again.”
—
New York Times Book Review