Awayland

January 1, 2018
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.

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January 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.

February 1, 2018
In vivid, precisely fashioned language, Ausubel spans the globe, from the tropics to the Arctic, in these 11 stories. While love is a continual theme, death and its specter also loom large. In Remedy, Summer and Kit are instant soulmates, but when Summer sees a neighbor die in a fall, she becomes obsessed with the idea of her imminent death until she finds a bizarre means to keep alive the intense love she shares with Kit. The drowning death of a man at an all-inclusive Turkish resort marks the life of an American teenager who's working there in Club Zeus, and when a woman who has returned to her childhood home of Beirut is near the end, her daughter arrives to watch her gradually vanish in Freshwater from the Sea. Sometimes Ausubel poses mind-bending questions: What if a Cyclops, looking for love, registered on an online dating site? What if the mayor of a stagnating Minnesota town offered a car to the mother of the first baby born on Lenin's birthday? Vibrant stories that expand horizons and minds.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

November 1, 2017

Winner of the PEN Center USA Fiction Award and an NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award finalist for her debut novel, No One Is Here Except All of Us, Ausubel continues her elegant, risk-taking way with this first collection of surprising short stories. Here, a homesick mother literally fades into mist and a small-town mayor offers a prize for any baby born on Lenin's birthday.

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Starred review from February 1, 2018

Ausubel's latest short story collection (after A Guide To Being Born), is aptly titled, as the stories inhabit the liminal place between experience and metaphor, giving them a dreamlike, sometimes nightmarish quality. For example, a cyclops fills out responses on an online dating form. A young couple, both orphans, consider an operation to switch hands so they will never be separated. Three men, near-frozen survivors of a shipwreck, encounter a hallucinatory mermaid. In one of the most poignant stories, a grown daughter goes to Lebanon to care for her aging mother, who is literally fading away like a cloud. Some stories explore women on the precipice of motherhood. In one, a study in passivity, a young woman finds herself pregnant while visiting her South African boyfriend. In another, a woman quits her job with the Mars space program for another project: trying to make a baby with a gay friend. VERDICT Also a noteworthy novelist (e.g., Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty), Ausubel is one of the better young short story writers around these days. Told in prose at once spare and image-laden, the stories are illuminating and memorable, with plots unfolding like exotic flowers, calm yet bizarre. [See Prepub Alert, 10/16/17.]--Reba Leiding, emeritus, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.