The Desert Nights, Rising Stars
Writers Conference

Ausubel, Ramona. "Atria." The New Yorker, April 4, 2011. See also Ramona's accompanying interview with Cressida Leyshon.

Hazel Whiting had finished her freshman year at Mountain Hills High, where there were a lot of ponytails and clanging metal lockers with pictures of hotties taped inside. She had some friends there, but not too many, and usually preferred being by herself to discussing other people’s haircuts or dreamed-of love lives. 

---. "Safe Passage." Short Story Project. 

The Grandmothers — dozens of them — find themselves at sea. They do not know how they got there. It seems to be after­noon, the glare from the sun keeps them squinting. They wander carefully, canes and orthotics, across the slippery metal deck of the ship, not built for human passage but for cargo. Huge ship­ ping crates are stacked at bow and stern. The grandmothers do not know what it means. Are we dead? they ask one an­other. Are we dying? Every part of the ship is metal, great sheets and hand-sized rivets. Cranes and transverses and bulkheads and longitudinals — all metal. All painted white and now splayed with the gray stars of gull droppings.

---. "Tributaries." Recommended Reading, Electric Literature, January 30, 2016.

At the heart of Ramona Ausubel’s “Tributaries” is an idea: love manifested in flesh. As we all strive, quixotically, to capture love in different ways — in poetry, in paint, in lyric, in gesture — in “Tributaries” love erupts as a new appendage, a “love-arm.” Mobile or inert, controlled or spasmodic, full-grown or a collection of half-developed lumps, the love-arms emerge in many forms. But this too proves to be an imperfect way to express feelings, and what makes Ausubel’s rendering remarkable is how deeply she explores the attendant politics and psychology. (Benjamin Samuel, editor)

Shelly, Lucie. "Ramona Ausubel Writes About What Bodies Do In Secret." Electric Literature, March 16, 2018.

"Stop. Think. There must be a harder way.” So reads a letterpress sign that hangs in the kitchen of Ramona Ausubel’s mother, which the author recalled at the launch evening for her previous book, The Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty. The message resonates with much of Ausubel’s writing: it’s funny, but it captures something absolutely true about how most of us navigate life—specifically, about the ways women reckon with being lovers, mothers, and artists.

Masad, Ilana. "A Fabulist Tour of Awayland." Los Angeles Review of Books, March 12, 2018. 

The best writers find ways to gather tidbits from their close observation of life and incorporate the strange truths of the world into their fiction. Ausubel’s most playful moments of fabulism exemplify her ability to absorb the odd, the amusing, and the eerie in everyday life [ . . . ] Moments like these, in which Ausubel ties her narrative whimsy to stranger-than-fiction truths, allow the collection some levity and provide breathing room for the more emotionally challenging stories.