Awayland
Stories
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4.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
“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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Everyday worries about pregnancy, mortality, and parents are given fantastical treatment in these playful stories by Ausubel (Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty). A cyclops builds an online dating profile, a chef joins a journey to Mars, Egyptian animal mummies thank the museum that displays them, and, in "Remedy," a dying man arranges to have one of his hands grafted onto his true love. There's an emphasis on eccentrics as in "Template For a Proclamation to Save the Species," in which the mayor of a small Minnesota town declares Lenin's birthday a holiday devoted to sexual procreation and a distinct predilection for the unexpected: stories feature dissipating mothers, an African menagerie, and a fixer-upper of a house at the juncture between heaven and hell. Ausubel clearly enjoys using the outlandish or mythical to underscore her characters' predicaments, but sometimes the quirkiness grows tiresome and the air tends to go out of her stories once they have exhausted their magical-realist premises. Still, Ausubel's best stories have an affecting vulnerability; fans of Kelly Link, Karen Russell, and Miranda July will want to give this a look.
