Awayland

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.