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
PRAISE FOR RUINED A LITTLE WHEN WE ARE BORN
“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
"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
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.