Baby in a Box
By Sarah Braunstein
W.W. Norton, June 9, 2026
Prescient and idiosyncratic stories about the cost and joys of caretaking from a “sharp-witted, ravishing” (The 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.
Praise for Bad Animals
”Wise, wily, intriguing, and so much fun, Bad Animals mesmerized me.”
–Lily King, author of Heart the Lover and Writers & Lovers
“Full of ideas, plot, verve, interesting scenes, and good writing… A writer to watch.”
–Kirkus
“Braunstein fashions a red-hot poker that skewers the limits of the white imagination…[A] sharp-witted, ravishing novel.”
–Claire Luchette, The New York Times Book Review
“[A] clever novel…The [novel within a novel] framework enables Braunstein to implicitly pose the questions: Who gets to tell your story? Whose stories can you trust?… In a book with supple writing throughout, [Braunstein] also evokes the state’s climate and its landscape in singular ways… It’s a credit to Braunstein’s craft that this tale, filled with incisive observations and often amusingly unflattering revelations about a few primary players, is also leavened with tenderness.” –WBUR Boston
“By turns hilarious and chilling, knowing and mysterious, the book is the story of a middle-aged librarian caught in the grips of literary, erotic and probably other obsessions.… Bad Animals is good, bad fun.” –Portland Press Herald
“Braunstein makes Maeve's emotions palpable as she attempts to clear her name and deal with her empty nester woes. [Bad Animals] has plenty of charm.”
–Publishers Weekly
“Exploring themes of appropriation, obsession, and control, Braunstein’s tangled novel will leave readers unsettled.” –Booklist
“Bad Animals opens with a delightful shock, and then the fun begins. With deft, sly, loving insight into the human animal and its genius for self-deception, Braunstein ratchets up and sustains this extraordinary novel’s elegance and complexity until the last, beautiful sentence.”
–Kate Christensen, author of The Great Man and Welcome Home, Stranger
“Sarah Braunstein’s Bad Animals is a dazzling high-wire act. Absolutely chilling.”
–Richard Russo, author of Somebody’s Fool
“Bad Animals is a story of intrigue, and mystery, and love. Above all, it’s about the lies we tell each other—and the ones we tell ourselves. It’s the best book yet by one of my favorite writers—haunting, unsettling, and unforgettable.”
–Jennifer Finney Boylan, author of Good Boy and coauthor of Mad Honey
“Wild, wicked, whip-smart, hilarious—Bad Animals brought out the hungry reader in me and I devoured it, blissfully. Sarah Braunstein is tough and tender in equal measure: unsparing on the subjects of whiteness, literary lions, and good intentions, yet so large-hearted that this giddy misadventure cannot help but turn moving in the most true and abiding way.” –Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, author of Likes
“Bad Animals kept me up all night for its gorgeous prose, its breathtaking insights into human nature, and its fresh, original page-turning plot. What a triumph.”
–Monica Wood, author of The One-In-a-Million Boy
“With a high-wire plot that’s beautifully built and slyly rendered, Bad Animals interrogates the insanely high costs of self-deception and offers us a supremely wise and damn funny story of bravery in the face of abject longing.”
–Susan Conley, author of Landslide
About the Author
Sarah Braunstein is the author of Bad Animals and The Sweet Relief of Missing Children. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker and Best American Short Stories, among other publications, and received a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 prize. She lives in Maine and teaches at Colby College.
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