Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
How to pronounce Ramona Ausubel: ah-soo-BELL
Ramona Ausubel is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of the novel No One Is Here Except All of Us and the short story collection A Guide to Being Born. 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 has been longlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, and was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Award and the Pushcart Prize.
Ramona Ausubel's website
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In a thoughtful and personal interview, BookBrowse reviewer Kim Kovacs talks with Ramona Ausubel about the inspiration for her debut novel, No One Is Here Except All of Us.
An Interview with Ramona Ausubel
It seems like you hit a mental roadblock after researching your family history, mired in facts that wouldn't form into a novel. In an interview with Penguin you said that you "got closer to the truth once I put my notes away." Can you tell us more about that?
I had interviewed my grandmother, gathered photographs and letters and objects and spent time in the library doing research, but when I started to write, I felt completely stuck. I didn't have nearly enough information to write a real history, yet the information was enough to feel limiting. Finally, I realized that historians were taking care of the history - I only had to write my own story. This was to be my version of the old village where my great-grandmother had lived, my own way of understanding that time. The "real" place was gone - no one can ever know what it was truly like to live there again. But by imagining my way in, I hoped to find another version of it, alive for a second time.
After being so overwhelmed by your research - which even led you...
Dictators ride to and fro on tigers from which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
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