About the Podcast

An evening of short fiction ... readings by both authors, followed by a panel discussion about the art of the short story.

About Battleborn

The head-turning debut from one of the National Book Foundation's "5 Under 35" fiction writers for 2012

In ten unforgettable stories, Claire Vaye Watkins takes on the mythology of the American West, fearlessly reimagining it. Her characters orbit around the region’s vast spaces, winning redemption despite—and often because of—the hardship and violence they encounter.

The arrival of a foreigner transforms the exchange of eroticism and emotion at a sex ranch. A prospecting hermit discovers the limits of his rugged individualism when he tries to rescue a teenager left for dead in the desert. Decades after she coaxed her best friend into a degrading encounter in a Vegas hotel room, a woman feels the aftershock. Most bravely of all, Watkins revisits—and reinvents—her own troubled legacy, in a story that emerges from the mayhem and destruction of the Manson family.

About A Guide to Being Born

Reminiscent of Aimee Bender and Karen Russell—an enthralling new collection that uses the world of the imagination to explore the heart of the human condition.

Major new literary talent Ramona Ausubel combines the otherworldly wisdom of her much-loved debut novel, No One Is Here Except All of Us, with the precision of the short-story form. A Guide toBeing 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. Funny, surprising, and delightfully strange—all the stories have a strong emotional core; Ausubel’s primary concern is always love, in all its manifestations.

Author Bio

Ramona Ausubel is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of California, Irvine. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, One Story, The Paris Review Daily, Best American Fantasy, and elsewhere, and has received special mentions in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. She was a finalist for the Pushcart Prize.

Claire Vaye Watkins's work has appeared in Granta, The Paris Review, Hobart, One Story, and Ploughshares. She is an assistant professor at Bucknell University and in 2012 was named one of the National Book Foundation’s "5 Under 35" fiction writers.