Unexpected encounters confine and define the lives of strangers, while parents and partners navigate blended families and modern love.
Prescient and idiosyncratic stories about the cost and joys of caretaking from a “sharp-witted, ravishing” (New York Times) writer. These stunning stories, steeped in black humor, startle and dismay. Unexpected encounters confine and define the lives of strangers, while parents and partners navigate blended families and modern love: An older woman tells her waitress that she once left a newborn on church steps. A motel housekeeper makes a radical proposal to a guest. A teenager grapples with atheism and grief and eBay. A mother’s world is disrupted and recharged after a neighborhood man gives her young daughter a telescope.
Throughout this bracing collection, we see parents doing their not-so-great best, breakups going wrong, obsessions getting out of hand—and yet moments of healing too, often where we least expect them. Strange, heartfelt, and wryly funny, Sarah Braunstein’s stories ask us to confront the ways we try to make sense of our lives—and what happens when we escape from these preconceptions.
Crackling with wit and compassion in equal measure, each of these stories is a little masterpiece. Braunstein is a genius at distilling the peculiar from the profound and vice versa. This collection is an absolute knockout.
— Antoine Wilson, author of Mouth to Mouth
Sarah Braunstein’s stories make me laugh and cry and think and feel deeply all at once. Her characters are the people you’ve wondered about: private lives, tiny secrets, large loves, terrible entanglements. It’s the stuff of opera (arias and all, my gosh, the beautiful language here!), but brought down to earth. What if some stranger gave your daughter a telescope? What if there were, in fact, a baby in a box? Here again in the face of everything are all the pleasures of reading, wrapped nicely with a bow, a gift for you, dear reader, a gift for all of us.
— Bill Roorbach, author of Life Among Giants, Lucky Turtle, and Beep.
These electrifying stories make the familiar strange, showing us how the most ordinary situation can be a transcendent one that brings us face to face with the mystery of our lives. Sarah Braunstein has an extraordinary voice, and this work is an astonishment.
— Marisa Silver, author of At Last
Baby in a Box is a book of masterful stories. As their wise plots unfold in wildly original ways, we watch how cold-hearted or sweetly lucky a character turns out to be, just as we’re stirred by the poignance of human strategies. A terrific book.
— Joan Silber, author of Improvement
