An inventive story collection that spans the globe as it explores love, childhood, and parenthood with an electric mix of humor and emotion.
Named a best book of 2018 by The San Francisco Chronicle, Lit Hub, Real Simple and longlisted for the Story Prize
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.
Praise for AWAYLAND
“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
“A bewitching collection of stories that hop between the real and the ridiculous.” –San Francisco Chronicle
“Insightful and tender and just fun to read. I love these stories.” –“All the Books,” BookRiot
“Anxious, whimsical, and deeply felt, Ausubel’s stories weave a remarkable and beautiful tapestry of emotion.” –Los Angeles Review of Books
“A darkness, an underlying and beautiful darkness, limns practically every moment in Ausubel’s work, but you hardly notice the darkness while reading, so dreamily enchanted are you by Ausubel’s language, her humor, her generosity on the page.” –Manuel Gonzales, Electric Literature
“A stunning assemblage of quasi-magical yet bewilderingly plausible tales … Every story here pretty much astounds for its daring, visionary scope and compassion.” –San Francisco Chronicle
“Awayland is a collection of many voyages and many lives. The stories take us around the world, and to whatever is beyond. Only a woman endlessly compassionate and curious could produce such fiction.” –Electric Lit
“This clever collection of short stories will take you on a trip around the world as it mines the complicated terrain of the heart.” –Omnivoracious
“[Ausubel’s] writing is acrobatic: colorful, flexible and inventive. … Formally and thematically, this creative collection will be a rewarding expedition for both veteran short story readers and newcomers to the genre.” –The Riveter
“To read an Ausubel story is to escape to another place … [her] prose is assured and often lovely, descriptions and insights presented in new and different ways.” –Ploughshares
“This collection is a globetrotting exploration of love, identity, childhood, and parenthood.” –Medium’s The Coil
“Ausubel … imbues every one of her offbeat yarns—whether about a mayor declaring an official day of lovemaking or a cyclops looking for hookups on a dating site—with weirdness and warmth.” –Oprah.com
“[A] collection of funny, endearing short stories … Each tale looks to the future in its own particular, touching way.” –Harper’s Bazaar
“The stories in Ramona Ausubel’s Awayland are galactic in scope, massive in scale, and universal in their flawless execution. From Mars to the streets of the Midwest, Ausubel tackles modern mythology in a way that is utterly original and endless fascinating — and, at the end of the day, it just might teach you something about yourself.” –Popsugar
“Fans of [Ramona Ausubel] and new readers alike will discover something to enjoy in Awayland. … An eclectic, humorous mix.” –Real Simple
“Told in prose at once spare and image-laden, the stories are illuminating and memorable, with plots unfolding like exotic flowers, calm yet bizarre.” –Library Journal, STARRED review
“In vivid, precisely fashioned language, Ausubel spans the globe, from the tropics to the Arctic, in these 11 stories. … Vibrant stories that expand horizons and minds.” –Booklist
“Everyday worries about pregnancy, mortality, and parents are given fantastical treatment in these playful stories. … Fans of Kelly Link, Karen Russel, and Miranda July will want to give this a look.” –Publishers Weekly
“Ramona Ausbel’s second short story collection continues to prove her a surprising, funny, and deft fabulist.” –B&N Reads
“Ramona Ausubel’s collection Awayland takes readers around the world and even into Heaven in 11 magnetic stories about parenthood, loneliness, and love. Tender and heartfelt, Awayland is often also as funny as it is emotionally affecting.” –Buzzfeed, “The 33 Most Exciting New Books of 2018”
“A tenderly imagined story collection, one that traverses small towns and tropical islands, all the while revealing truths about parenthood, love, and growing up that you didn’t know you needed to hear, but are so immensely glad you did.” –Southern Living, “Our Bookshelves Can’t Wait for These Spring 2018 Releases”
“Eleven stories laced with humorous developments, mythic tendencies, and magical realist premises. Ausubel is, at heart, a fabulist, and the current collection puts this impulse in the forefront…Many of the stories are both interesting and amusing…Clever literary games.” –Kirkus
“Ausubel continues her elegant, risk-taking way with this first collection of short stories. Here’s your chance to be intrigued by scenarios that include a homesick mother literally fading into mist, a small-town mayor offering a prize for any baby born on Lenin’s birthday, and a chef bound for Mars who must first conquer troubles close to home.” –Library Journal