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Baby in a Box: Stories
Not yet published
Expected 9 Jun 26Prescient 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 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.
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 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.
- GenresShort Stories
224 pages, Paperback
Expected publication June 9, 2026
About the author
Sarah Braunstein
5 books86 followersSarah Braunstein is the author of Bad Animals and The Sweet Relief of Missing Children. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker and the Harvard Review. The recipient of a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” award, she lives in Portland, Maine, and teaches at Colby College.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 18, 2026
This is not only the best collection of short stories I’ve ever read, it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read in my life. Full stop. No exaggeration, no scam, no regrets. Like, I kind of don’t even wanna tell y’all because then you’ll know and you’ll read it and love it and I just want these all to myself. I wanna eat this book like a damn goat.
Every story in here, whether it’s kids losing their souls and their wits to mail-in-payment eBay scams, people losing babies, keeping babies, finding babies, having babies, characters coming together at all odds and brushing each other’s humanity so precisely, so exactly with prose that is unexplainably laced with this addicting page turning literary magic…
Braunstein does this thing in every story, it’s this THING I don’t have a word or a term for, but she’s able to either suddenly or slowly, whichever way the story requires, elevate it above the ground it starts on. You don’t quite realize you’re floating until you are and you can see the story for what it is, you can see something about yourself for what you are, because of whatever it is she’s done in text as she tells each story.
Baby in a Box: two sections, Lost and Found, eleven stories across them each precisely a distilled galaxy. I both couldn’t stop reading and had to stop after each story’s ending that perfectly toes the edge of the cliff that peers into the surreal but doesn’t lose its footing even once.
Top whatever list of all time favorite books for me. Easily. No one’s doing it like this—maybe Maxine Rosaler in The Missing Kidney had a few that could stand alongside these eleven, maybe Aysegul Savas has written some in Long Distance that I liked close to this too. This was Interpreter of Maladies good, I think. This is that kind of perfection in my eyes. I’m stunned it’s only coming out in paperback this June. It should be bound in threaded gold. Shall I go on? Get this baby in a box on the way to your HOUSE already.
Thanks for the free copy @w.w.norton — cannot believe I got so lucky as to get this and to open it and read it immediately. Like I said, sometimes you hold a book and you just know this is the one. People; this is the one.
Every story in here, whether it’s kids losing their souls and their wits to mail-in-payment eBay scams, people losing babies, keeping babies, finding babies, having babies, characters coming together at all odds and brushing each other’s humanity so precisely, so exactly with prose that is unexplainably laced with this addicting page turning literary magic…
Braunstein does this thing in every story, it’s this THING I don’t have a word or a term for, but she’s able to either suddenly or slowly, whichever way the story requires, elevate it above the ground it starts on. You don’t quite realize you’re floating until you are and you can see the story for what it is, you can see something about yourself for what you are, because of whatever it is she’s done in text as she tells each story.
Baby in a Box: two sections, Lost and Found, eleven stories across them each precisely a distilled galaxy. I both couldn’t stop reading and had to stop after each story’s ending that perfectly toes the edge of the cliff that peers into the surreal but doesn’t lose its footing even once.
Top whatever list of all time favorite books for me. Easily. No one’s doing it like this—maybe Maxine Rosaler in The Missing Kidney had a few that could stand alongside these eleven, maybe Aysegul Savas has written some in Long Distance that I liked close to this too. This was Interpreter of Maladies good, I think. This is that kind of perfection in my eyes. I’m stunned it’s only coming out in paperback this June. It should be bound in threaded gold. Shall I go on? Get this baby in a box on the way to your HOUSE already.
Thanks for the free copy @w.w.norton — cannot believe I got so lucky as to get this and to open it and read it immediately. Like I said, sometimes you hold a book and you just know this is the one. People; this is the one.
Review of advance copy received from Goodreads Giveaways
The stories are eclectic and well written. I especially enjoyed the weird overall feel the book has.
Review of advance copy received from Edelweiss+
I really can’t remember the last time I was actually rooting for people to fall in love, and a lot of these stories culminate in the characters doing just that. There were a few standout stores (“Porcupine” in particular) but I wasn’t captivated by everything. A solid and strong 3.5.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews