book cover of Tributaries
 

Tributaries

(2013)
A Novella by

 
 
Love strikes in unpredictable ways. Sometimes we're looking for it, other times it finds us, and all too often we believe we've found it only to discover we were wrong. Love can be mutual or impossible or unrequited or budding. We chase it, fall into it; it spurns us and consumes us. In whatever form love inhabits, we always recognize that gutsick elation, that sublime devouring, or, as it's described in this story, that "lucky thing that everyone hopes for."

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.

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About the author:
Ramona Ausubel is the author of the novel No One is Here Except All of Us, which was a New York Times Editor's Choice and a San Francisco Chronicle and Huffington Post Best Book of the Year. Her new book A Guide to Being Born is a collection of short stories, which will be out in May. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review Daily, One Story, The Best American Fantasy and shortlisted in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Non-Required Reading.

Genre: Fantasy

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