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Stories
by Sarah Braunstein
Book Reviewed by: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 dark humor, startle and dismay, and introduce us to a cast of eccentric and wholly believable characters. 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. Strange, heartfelt, sly, 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.
The work is structured as two halves of roughly equal length: six stories under the heading "Lost," followed by five marked "Found." That split suggests a move toward lighthearted content, which is true to some extent as new situations and connections offer fresh prospects. However, the tone as a whole feels more stoic than cheery. This is particularly evident in several stories featuring single women facing tough choices about partners and parenting. In the title story, pregnant Margot decides to leave her diner job and raise a child alone, not trusting her chef boyfriend, who's 18 years younger than her, to be a reliable co-parent. "Abject Naturalism" was first published in The New Yorker and was also selected for The Best American Short Stories 2025. Toni had a baby by a colleague from her graduate writing program who left her before her C-section healed. Now that baby, Amalie, is approaching adolescence. While she's afraid for her daughter's safety, Toni tries to trust that all will be well as she herself builds an unexpected romantic connection. The title phrase was Toni's professor's withering critique of her prose, but in this context it's redeemed as a defense of the everyday, which isn't wretched but comfortingly ordinary...continued
Full Review
(763 words)
(Reviewed by Rebecca Foster).
Antoine Wilson, author of Mouth to Mouth
Crackling with wit and compassion in equal measure, each of these stories is a little masterpiece…This collection is an absolute knockout. Joan Silber, author of Improvement
Baby in a Box is a book of masterful stories.
Four stories from Sarah Braunstein's Baby in a Box were first published in The New Yorker, a magazine with a 101-year history of showcasing excellent short fiction from the likes of John Cheever, Mavis Gallant, Jhumpa Lahiri, Alice Munro, Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, and William Trevor.
While short stories can be difficult to sell to publishers (and thus to readers), The New Yorker has a reputation as one of the premier platforms for short fiction. Being published in it can be one marker of a writer at their pinnacle. In her recent work of literary history, Middlemen, Laura B. McGrath notes that having a breakout story in a big-name literary magazine is considered a sign of a potentially successful novelist, so literary agents ...
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