Up Front - NYTimes.com Helen Oyeyemi, who reviews Ramona Ausubel's short-­story collection, "A Guide to Being Born," this week, can't remember when she started writing. It was surely long before her first novel, "The Icarus Girl," was published in 2005, when Oyeyemi was still a 20-year-old student at Cambridge University, and she has published three more in the eight years since. In an e-mail, she described her next novel, "Boy, Snow, Bird," as "about a woman named Boy who tries to avoid becoming a wicked stepmother and really doesn't know if she's going to manage it. Her husband gets a say to some extent, but ultimately it's up to Boy, her biological daughter, Bird, and her stepdaughter, Snow, to decide what sort of family they're going to be. Oyeyemi's earlier fiction is similarly inclined toward the fantastical. "I tend to prioritize emotional realism above the known laws of time and space," she said, "and when you do that, it's inevitable that strange things happen. Which can be quite enjoyable, I think. Born in Nigeria, Oyeyemi moved to London when she was 4 and, after spending time in Prague a few years ago, has been living there for the past several months. When asked what took her back to Prague, she enumerated a list of the city's charms. The astronomical clock, the best strudel in the universe (to be found in Zizkov, Prague 3). . . . The men in pubs who buy two beers at a time because they already know they won't want to wait for that second pint," Oyeyemi added. I could go on and on. This has been a very long way of saying that I just like Prague's style.