Hudson Street Press

Reminiscent of Aimee Bender and Karen Russell--an enthralling new collection that uses the world of the imagination to explore the heart of the human condition. Major new literary talent Ramona Ausubel combines the otherworldly wisdom of her much-loved debut novel, "No One Is Here Except All of Us," with the precision of the short-story form. "A Guide toBeing 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. Funny, surprising, and delightfully strange--all the stories have a strong emotional core; Ausubel's primary concern is always love, in all its manifestations.

From the bestselling author of Girl in Translation, a novel about a young woman torn between her family duties and her secret escapes into a more Western world. The elder daughter of a ballerina and a noodle-maker, immigrants from Beijing, Charlie Wong grew up in Manhattan's Chinatown. Although she is an ABC (American-born Chinese), at twenty-two she has hardly left that neighbourhood, her entire world fitting within its familiar boundaries. She still lives in the only apartment she has ever known, a tiny one-bedroom she shares with her father and sister, and works as a dishwasher at the local noodle shop. When Charlie somehow lands a job as a receptionist at a ballroom dance studio uptown, her expectations are upended. Far from the streets of Chinatown, she is introduced to an entirely new world, one that encourages her to imagine a bigger life than what she has known. Keeping it an elaborate secret from her father, she spends more and more time at the dance studio, and awkward Charlie's natural talents – and dreams – begin to emerge. But as a local witch has told her, 'What one sister gains, shall the other lose,' and soon enough, Charlie's blossoming coincides with the appearance of chronic illness in her younger sister. Charlie is forced to try to reconcile her two selves and her two worlds – Eastern and Western, old and new – to rescue her sister without sacrificing her newfound confidence and identity.