MWPA, Longfellow Books & Mechanics' Hall host Sarah Braunstein & Nick Fuller Googins in conversation.
"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
"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, 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.
Tuesday, June 9 at 7:00 PM (doors 6:30 PM). Free to the public. Please register in advance as space is limited.
Sarah Braunstein is the author of Bad Animals and The Sweet Relief of Missing Children..Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker and The Best American Short Stories,,among other publications, and she received a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 prize. She lives in Maine and teaches at Colby College. For more: www.sarahbraunstein.com
Nick Fuller Googins is the author of the novels, The Frequency of Living Things and The Great Transition. His short fiction and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Men’s Health, The Sun, The Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. He lives in Maine, and works as an elementary school teacher. He is a member of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, as well as the National Education Association, the largest labor union in the United States.
