Awayland: Stories
Written by Ramona Ausubel
3.5/5
()
Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this audiobook
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
Ramona Ausubel
Ramona Ausubel is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of No One Is Here Except All of Us. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, One Story, The Paris Review Daily, Best American Fantasy, and elsewhere, and has received special mentions in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. She has been longlisted for The Frank O'Connor Short Story Prize, and a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions award and the Pushcart Prize.
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Reviews for Awayland
27 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I love the way this author writes, her turns of phrase, and how she inserted social and political issues into these stories, and did so seamlessly. These stories are clever, imaginative, and all surprising. Divided into four sections, each section stressing an emotion, and from the title it would be correct to assume each of these stories deal with characters who want to go away. Some on a trip, some from their lives, some from expectations and sameness, and in one story, Fresh water from the sea, a daughter returns to the sight of her mother physically vanishing day by day, fading a little more each time. Their are insightful comments, criticism which the author does not shy away from making. Metaphors abound and none seem out of place. The less said about these stories the better I think so that each reader will have their own surprise when they start reading. This is the kind of book, the type of stories that I believe can be read again and again, and each time the reader will think, discover or feel something new, different. Just one little warning, if you plan to register with a dating service, be aware that you may find yourself dating a cyclops.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A nice collection of short stories from a talented writer. All in all, I came away with a feeling of ennui and some nice quotes.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This collection of stories takes you to other lands only to bring you home. Ausubel has a mesmerizing way with words. The grace & wit in the telling of these tales will get you hooked on a journey you never thought you would take.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Travelling people, travelling bodies.
Ausubel's A Guide to Being Born was one of my favourite short story collections perhaps, um, ever and it spurred a love affair with short story collections for me. Ausubel has a way of writing about bodies and people that inspire dread. Weird, wonderful and a rumination on autonomy, I always loved reading her work.
So, I came into this one with high hopes.
The first story was so funny and so brilliant, I fell in love with it right away. The rest of the collection is not as weird as A Guide to Being Born. It's ... more domestic, quieter but never less threatening. If you can't decide if Ausubel is for you, I would start with this collection before going onto A Guide to Being Born.
I found this really readable and although it was different to A Guide to Being Born, I didn't enjoy it any less. If I had to choose, I'd say A Guide to Being Born is my favourite, but I still really liked it.