The first draw to this collection is a cyclops who is developing his dating profile (aided by THE cheeriest saleswoman), but stay to survey all of AWAYLAND. Hear the tale of a woman who is trying to have a baby with a friend (it was “a better escape” than being a chef on “fake Mars”) and the one of the dying lover who is determined to have her hand grafted onto her boyfriend’s. The “gratitude” shown by the animal mummies is hilarious, and cheekily voiced in a British accent. The listener may prefer some tales over others, but the voices for each are good matches, like the wiser-than-his-years teenage boy who is working at a Turkish resort. A grieving mother is voiced gravely, with anxiety and pain. The terrain is strange, the themes are many, and the narrations are smooth guides. M.P.P. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

In Ramona Ausubel's second collection of short fiction, Awayland, things both are and aren't what they seem. A mother fades to mist before her grieving daughter. A Cyclops fills out an online dating profile. A cook leaves her job preparing food for astronauts in training for a Mars mission, only to find herself in a different sort of alien world, filled with donors and surrogates and in vitro fertilization; "If I wanted a baby," she observes, "there was a planet of white-coated scientists together with the lush, young wombs of poorer women. All I had to do was travel there." The point, or one of them, is that every landscape is strange or unknown, perhaps especially if it is a landscape we have created for ourselves. "The rest of the afternoon," Ausubel observes of the woman and her disappearing parent, "the girl and her mother did what people do: went on in spite of what had changed."

What Ausubel is evoking is love, which animates Awayland like the beating of a secret heart. Her characters can't get along without it, although it is a source of turmoil and upheaval in their lives. Take Lucy, the protagonist of "Mother Land," who moves from California to Africa with her boyfriend (known as "the African") because she wants to be close to him, only to end up distanced from herself. "The African fell asleep just after dusk and woke at dawn," Ausubel begins the story. "In late summer, when Lucy had met him in Los Angeles, this was reasonable. Long days, short nights. By mid- October, she felt half abandoned." In Africa, dependent and unmoored, unable even to speak the language, "Lucy was the only thing she had not considered: meaningless." Still, isn't that the case with all of us? We create distinctions, Ausubel insists, that are nothing if not arbitrary, then cling to them as if they define something essential about who we are. The reality, Lucy realizes, as she and the African visit zebras at a game preserve, is that "[t]here was no separation between human and animal. All any of them were was skin and fur, muscle and oxygen, the ability to ear, to run, to raise their young."

There's more than a bit of the fairy tale to such a moment, with its blurring of the line between animal and human, and its air of removal from a familiar world. Something similar takes place in many of Awayland's eleven stories, which situate themselves between naturalism and fantasy. There's that Cyclops, for instance, looking for love among the circuits of the Internet -- he is both mythic, of his own species, and also in some way of ours. "I will not shackle your slender wrists to the cold walls or gnaw your nails down to the quick with my remaining teeth," he promises. "I will not leave you hungry while I eat a roast goat at your feet. I've dealt with those issues." In "Remedy," a dying woman and her husband travel to Thailand for shared hand replacement surgery; "the only way to love your love after you die," she imagines, "is to give him one of your hands." Even "Club Zeus," narrated by an American teenager working for the summer at a Turkish resort, veers into the unexpected when a tourist dies in one of the swimming pools. "The fat Russian man did not even exist to me this morning," the boy insists." But now, by afternoon, he is singular, and he will be in my life forever. I will bring him to bed with me tonight, his face down form floating in the pool of my mind. He will come to my last year of high school, maybe appear in my college essay, will be one of the stories I tell a beautiful girl I have a crush on to make her love me."

The idea, of course, is that all we are, all we have, are stories; without them, we might . . . well . . . evaporate. It's a faith Ausubel shares with Kelly Link, whose work also traverses a line between the concrete and the fantastic, drawing real emotion, real depth, from situations that can be deliriously extreme. "The Animal Mummies Wish to Thank the Following" operates as an annotated list, in which the mummified creatures at Cairo's Egyptian Museum offer gratitude (but do they really?) to the donors, tourists, and others who keep them rooted to the world. "If the cat mummies must be grateful for one thing," Ausubel explains, "it is that they are forever-cats and not forever-rodents. The cat mummies can think of nothing so embarrassing as that -- the great gift a vole gets is, finally, to die." Even in the afterlife, in other words, the hierarchies remain. "The girl remembered the water cycle: evaporation, condensation, precipitation," she tells us at the end of "Fresh Water from the Sea," that story of the mother who turns to vapor. "A storm broke over the girl, thunderheads, lightning, rain and rain and rain and rain."

That's a lovely image, one that, for all its roots in dissolution, reminds us that we might find reconciliation of a kind. That this doesn't always look the way we expect goes without saying; just ask those cat mummies in the museum. This is the challenge of stories, that they offer us meaning, closure even -- but only for a little while. In the end, we die, or those around us do, leaving us drenched in emotion, and also memory. Ausubel makes the point explicit in "High Desert," among the most moving stories in the collection, which wrestles with an irreconcilable loss. "Two thousand years after her people left Jerusalem and eighty years after they left Turkey and twenty-nine years after the death of her daughter," she writes, "the woman walks down the desert road and she feels her body letting go of her." The sentence is full of echoes: mothers and daughters, and Turkey, and the sense of a woman adrift within her life. The body here, as throughout the book, is not a burden exactly but certainly a veil. And yet, after the mother has a hysterectomy, she is visited by her long-drowned daughter -- another blurring of the boundaries or maybe a hallucination, who can tell? "Don't tell me if you suffered," the mother asks her. "Don't tell me what it was like in the water before you got used to it."

This, in the end, is all we can hope for, that our loved ones do not suffer, whatever else may happen to them. As for the rest, it's inexplicable, a source of wonder and terror, the mystery at the center of the world. Such a mystery inflects the stories in Awayland, weighting them like wishes cast against the void. Or, as Ausubel writes, describing mummies so dead they no longer have bodies: "The nothing mummies are filled with prayers written on slips of papyrus, organs of faith. If the scientists came and cut them open, the nothing mummies wonder: Would the little piece of hieroglyphed papyrus rolling out be any less beautiful than the dried raisin of a heart? Aren't they not only the container but the prayer itself?"

David L. Ulin is the author of Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, he spent ten years as book editor and book critic of the Los Angeles Times.

Reviewer: David L. Ulin

…Ramona Ausubel's excellent and peculiar story collection…charts ever more steadily her interest in relationships, particularly within a family. These are not normal families, not happy or sad families, but families so cracked and mythologically weird that they are more like interesting old ruins. They are families as written by Hans Christian Andersen with the poetry of Auden, both of whom used fairy-tale imagery to explain our suffering. ("You shall love your crooked neighbor with your crooked heart," Auden wrote in 1937, in what could be a mantra for Awayland.)…"Come with me and be adored, deep below the earth," one of Ausubel's characters, who happens to be a Cyclops, writes in his dating profile. This doubles as the writer's invitation to the reader to enter her very private, haunting and beautiful worlds.

01/29/2018
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. (Mar.)

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

“Anxious, whimsical, and deeply felt, Ausubel’s stories weave a remarkable and beautiful tapestry of emotion... Ausubel’s signature ability to create atmosphere is in full force throughout Awayland, and the surreal or discomfiting moods sometimes wrapped around the stories are fitting for characters moving away from their comfort zones. By also touching upon social and political issues, she adds a new layer to her work that invites readers to move away from their comfort zones as well.” –Los Angeles Review of Books

“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

“[Ausubel] imbues every one of her offbeat yarns...with weirdness and warmth.” –O, The Oprah Magazine

“[A] collection of funny, endearing short stories…Each tale looks to the future in its own particular, touching way.” –Harper’s Bazaar

“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

“Fans of [Ramona Ausubel] and new readers alike will discover something to enjoy in Awayland… An eclectic, humorous mix.” –Real Simple

“To read an Ausubel story is to escape to another place…[her] prose is assured and...lovely, descriptions and insights presented in new and different ways.” –Ploughshares

“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

“Tender and heartfelt, Awayland is often also as funny as it is emotionally affecting.” –Buzzfeed

“The precise word for the stories in Awayland is enchanting… What remains consistent in this globetrotting collection is Ausubel’s wit, and her tenderness, and her commitment to exploring universal quandaries in fabulist ways. Each of these stories shines.” –Refinery29

"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 endlessly fascinating—and, at the end of the day, it just might teach you something about yourself.” –Popsugar

“When a book opens with a Cyclops filling out an online dating profile, you know the collection of stories will not disappoint. Ausubel's stories mix familiarity with weirdness, leaving room for concrete concepts we understand (family, love, finding home) to mix with more off-kilter themes, like ghosts and space travel, to create an exciting and heartwarming volume of stories.” –Apartment Therapy

“Insightful and tender and just fun to read. I love these stories.” –BookRiot

“Few story collections in recent memory have been as simultaneously funny, sad and peculiar as Ramona Ausubel's breathtaking Awayland… Playful yet affecting, Awayland is the vibrant work of a gifted storyteller.” –Shelf Awareness
 
“With touches of magic and fabulism, this is Ausubel at her finest.” –Read It Forward

“[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

“Ramona Ausbel’s second short story collection continues to prove her a surprising, funny, and deft fabulist.” –B&N Reads

“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

“Everyday worries about pregnancy, mortality, and parents are given fantastical treatment in these playful stories… Ausubel’s best stories have an affecting vulnerability; fans of Kelly Link, Karen Russell, and Miranda July will want to give this a look.” –Publishers Weekly

“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.” –Kirkus

“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
 

2017-12-07
Eleven stories laced with humorous developments, mythic tendencies, and magical realist premises.Ausubel (Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty, 2016, etc.) is, at heart, a fabulist, and the current collection puts this impulse in the forefront. The stories are grouped in four sections with geographical names—Bay of Hungers, The Cape of Persistent Hope, The Lonesome Flats, and The Dream Isles. Among the "hungers" is a funny piece previously published in the New Yorker: an online dating profile filled out by a Cyclops. It is followed by a more melancholy tale: a woman's mother is inexorably fading away—not metaphorically, but actually disappearing. Third is "Template for a Proclamation to Save the Species," in which a Midwestern mayor tries to address his town's declining population by declaring a designated sex day and offering a prize—a tiny white Ford economy car—for babies born exactly nine months later. The stories in the next section continue the baby theme. "Mother Land" seems to be about the sister of the woman whose mother faded away, though this appears to be the only such linkage among the stories. She has a baby with a white African man, in Africa, and feels very cut off from her real life. In "Departure Lounge," a woman quits her job as chef to a space program project being carried out on the crater of a volcano in Hawaii to attempt to get pregnant with an old college boyfriend. It turns out high-tech measures will be required. Many of the stories are both interesting and amusing; some are a little juvenile, like "Remedy," a silly yarn about lovers whose doomed love drives them to have a transplant operation. But this is followed by one of the gems of the collection, "Club Zeus," narrated by a young man who works at a mythology-themed resort. "Most of the staff is Ukrainian, but I'm from California. My job is to be the Wizened Storyteller…. I sit in a hut all day and tell Greek myths to whoever comes in."Clever literary games.