Ruined a Little When We Are Born by Tara Isabel Zambrano
For fans of Carmen Maria Machado and Jhumpa Lahiri, Ruined a Little When We Are Born delivers a stunning exploration of family and motherhood against the backdrop of Indian diaspora and culture. Tara Isabel Zambrano weaves elements from both the physical and supernatural worlds to beg the question: are we all ruined a little from our first breath?
A young couple ponders their opposing religions after one of them finds a cow’s tongue left on their porch. A widow helps her neighbor mourn the death of his wife by burying the woman’s belongings in the backyard. A mother forces her daughter to undergo various rituals to lighten her skin to find a good match. And when a man needs a son as his heir, he brings his new, much younger wife to live with his current wife and daughter, changing his daughter’s life in ways she couldn’t have imagined.
In stunning prose, Zambrano’s stories traverse the delights and fears of parenthood in terrifying clarity, exploring the suppression and display of desire in women and girls in daring candor.
Publication Date: October 15, 2024
Paperback
ISBN: 9780983740582
For fans of Carmen Maria Machado and Jhumpa Lahiri, Ruined a Little When We Are Born delivers a stunning exploration of family and motherhood against the backdrop of Indian diaspora and culture. Tara Isabel Zambrano weaves elements from both the physical and supernatural worlds to beg the question: are we all ruined a little from our first breath?
A young couple ponders their opposing religions after one of them finds a cow’s tongue left on their porch. A widow helps her neighbor mourn the death of his wife by burying the woman’s belongings in the backyard. A mother forces her daughter to undergo various rituals to lighten her skin to find a good match. And when a man needs a son as his heir, he brings his new, much younger wife to live with his current wife and daughter, changing his daughter’s life in ways she couldn’t have imagined.
In stunning prose, Zambrano’s stories traverse the delights and fears of parenthood in terrifying clarity, exploring the suppression and display of desire in women and girls in daring candor.
Publication Date: October 15, 2024
Paperback
ISBN: 9780983740582
For fans of Carmen Maria Machado and Jhumpa Lahiri, Ruined a Little When We Are Born delivers a stunning exploration of family and motherhood against the backdrop of Indian diaspora and culture. Tara Isabel Zambrano weaves elements from both the physical and supernatural worlds to beg the question: are we all ruined a little from our first breath?
A young couple ponders their opposing religions after one of them finds a cow’s tongue left on their porch. A widow helps her neighbor mourn the death of his wife by burying the woman’s belongings in the backyard. A mother forces her daughter to undergo various rituals to lighten her skin to find a good match. And when a man needs a son as his heir, he brings his new, much younger wife to live with his current wife and daughter, changing his daughter’s life in ways she couldn’t have imagined.
In stunning prose, Zambrano’s stories traverse the delights and fears of parenthood in terrifying clarity, exploring the suppression and display of desire in women and girls in daring candor.
Publication Date: October 15, 2024
Paperback
ISBN: 9780983740582
PRAISE FOR RUINED A LITTLE WHEN WE ARE BORN
"Through beautifully constructed sentences that read as much like prayers as they do like prose, Zambrano’s stories slither and grow like unpredictable, invasive vines, creeping inside your brain and refusing to leave. It doesn’t seem to matter whether she gives herself 10 pages or just one; this is an author who understands that the job of fiction is to generate empathy and genuine emotional response in the reader, and who knows how to extract those things with poise and confidence." —BookPage starred review
“Tara Isabel Zambrano is a writer of gorgeous, evocative prose, her every sentence a summoning forth of desire, magic, or wonder—and oftentimes all three at once. I loved these stories.” —Matt Bell, author of Appleseed
“Every story in this collection touches on family, marriage, motherhood, and other relationships, with stories that bend reality to ones firmly rooted in the realistic, showing characters transformed by life. … Zambrano’s writing on desire is powerful because it is never just a moment between two people; the desire explodes through their whole environment.” —SmokeLong Quarterly
"Zambrano’s writing is elegant and descriptive... She doesn’t mince words and always sets up her stories with many possibilities of what’s to come in the following paragraphs."—Asian Review of Books
"In the emotive, deeply loving, and sometimes erotic pages of Tara Isabel Zambrano's collection Ruined a Little when We Are Born, we meet a talking orgasm with star dust in her edges, a girl who grows extra hands when her mother dies, a skinny boy who makes love to the Devil, thirsty ghosts. In these stories, whole lives, marriages, births, deaths, and afterlifes unfold in the words and blank spaces of just a few pages. The stories build on one another - sensory, sensual, pulsing with life and color -- leaving the reader breathless and starstruck by the wildly inventive twists of Zambrano's vibrant prose." —Alex DiFrancesco, author of Transmutation
“In her captivating new collection, Tara Isabel Zambrano deftly blurs the lines between reality and fantasy, weaving together narratives that explore the surreal within the confines of the everyday. Each story is a masterclass in brevity and depth, in precision and elegance. A stunning and remarkably original collection.” —Andrew Porter, author of The Disappeared
"Enchanting and heartbreaking, Zambrano’s prose pulses with intensity, magic, and insight. The characters in this collection navigate femininity, family, and desire in ways that will keep you captivated and wanting more." —Laura Picklesimer, author of Kill For Love
“The short stories in Tara Isabel Zambrano’s new collection Ruined a Little When We Are Born crackle with life, energy, mystery, and passion. Here you will find twists of fate, heartaches, dreams, children, animals, mothers and fathers, gods and goddesses. Lovers leave. The dead come back. Dawn bursts into the room. Told in precise, razor-sharp sentences, these are stories that cut cleanly and deep.” —Steve Edwards, author of Breaking into the Backcountry
"The stories in Ruined A Little When We Are Born are a master class in the speculative form and in the literature of the Indian diaspora. Each of these stories creates its own narrative ecosystem, rich with sex, rife with family secrets, and rooted in the intimacies of place and the deft renderings of characters who are imperfect in their aims and yet consummate in their longings. Tara Isabel Zambrano is one of my favorite living short story writers, and the intelligence and inventiveness of the stories in this collection illustrate exactly why." —Megan Pillow, Author of Do The Work
"Fast-paced plots, razor-sharp writing, and so apt imagery! Short, snappy, surprising, sensual, and sometimes even shocking, Tara Isabel Zambrano's Ruined a Little When We Are Born is a unique and playful collection in which each story tells us a lot more in just a few pages and leaves us with an invigorating experience." —Aruni Kashyap, Director of Creative Writing Program, University of Georgia
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tara Isabel Zambrano is a South Asian writer and the author of a full-length flash and short story collection Death, Desire, And Other Destinations by OKAY Donkey Press in 2020. She lives in Texas and is an electrical engineer by profession.
