Being Born

Photographs and text describe the baby's nine-month journey from conception to birth. Suggested level: intermediate, secondary.

In this volume, which reaffirms the uncompromising brilliance of his mind, Cioran strips the human condition down to its most basic components, birth and death, suggesting that disaster lies not in the prospect of death but in the fact of birth, "that laughable accident." In the lucid, aphoristic style that characterizes his work, Cioran writes of time and death, God and religion, suicide and suffering, and the temptation to silence. Through sharp observation and patient contemplation, Cioran cuts to the heart of the human experience. “A love of Cioran creates an urge to press his writing into someone’s hand, and is followed by an equal urge to pull it away as poison.”—The New Yorker “In the company of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard."—Publishers Weekly "No modern writer twists the knife with Cioran's dexterity. . . . His writing . . . is informed with the bitterness of genuine compassion."—Boston Phoenix

Reminiscent of Aimee Bender and Karen Russell, from the author of the new collection, Awayland—an enthralling book of stories that uses the world of the imagination to explore the heart of the human condition. Major literary talent Ramona Ausubel, author of Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty, 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 to Being 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.

Fotografisk billedværk.

All human beings are born and all human beings die. In these two ways we are finite: our lives begin and our lives come to an end. Historically philosophers have concentrated attention on our mortality—and comparatively little has been said about being born and how it shapes our existence. Alison Stone sets out to overcome this oversight by providing a systematic philosophical account of how being born shapes our condition as human beings. Drawing on both feminist philosophy and existentialist concerns about the structure of meaningful human existence, Stone offers an original perspective on human existence. She explores how human existence is shaped by the way that we are born. Taking natality into account transforms our view of human existence and illuminates how many of its aspects are connected with our birth. These aspects include dependency, the relationality of the self, vulnerability, reception and inheritance of culture and history, embeddedness in social power, situatedness, and radical contingency. Considering natality also sheds new light on anxiety, mortality, and the temporality of human life. This book therefore bears on death and the meaning of life, as well as many debates in feminist and continental philosophy.

First published in paperback in 2008. Reprinted 2009, 2013.

“We’re doomed.” So begins the work of the philosopher whose unabashed and aphoristic indictments of the human condition have been cropping up recently in popular culture. Today we find ourselves in an increasingly inhospitable world that is, at the same time, starkly indifferent to our species-specific hopes, desires, and disappointments. In the Anthropocene, pessimism is felt everywhere but rarely given its proper place. Though pessimism may be, as Eugene Thacker says, the lowest form of philosophy, it may also contain an enigma central to understanding the horizon of the human. Written in a series of fragments, aphorisms, and prose poems, Thacker’s Cosmic Pessimism explores the varieties of pessimism and its often-conflicted relation to philosophy. “Crying, laughing, sleeping—what other responses are adequate to a life that is so indifferent?”

This scathing “comedy of manners” set in the 1940s “steers us through the lives of women who come to New York . . . for love, money, opportunity, and a good time” (New York Times). At the center of this 1942 novel are a wealthy, self-involved newspaper publisher and his scheming, novelist wife, Amanda Keeler—who ensnares Ohioan Vicky Haven in her social and romantic manipulations. Author Dawn Powell always denied Amanda Keeler was based upon the real-life Clare Boothe Luce until years later when she discovered a memo she’d written to herself in 1939 that said, “Why not do a novel on Clare Luce?” Which prompted Powell to write in her diary, “Who can I believe? Me or myself?” Set against an atmospheric backdrop of New York City in the months just before America’ s entry into World War II, A Time of Be Born is a scathing and hilarious study of cynical New Yorkers stalking each other for various selfish ends.