A Guide to Being Born

A Guide to Being 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.