Please join Back Cove Books and MWPA as we celebrate Sarah Braunstein and her short story, “Abject Naturalism,” first published The New Yorker and featured in this year’s The Best American Short Stories, edited by Celeste Ng.
“Short stories can act like little tuning forks, helping us to clarify our own values,” writes guest editor Celeste Ng. “In a time when our values are being tested daily, it’s hard to think of anything more important.” The Best American Short Stories 2025 resonates precisely at this pitch: twenty pieces that upend expectations and test the foundation of our beliefs. From a bereaved medical actress obsessed with a student in her rotation to a mysterious sickness that ignites a lethal running mania in its victims, and from the grounds of a wild animal estate to a celebrity look-alike mother-for-hire, these stories transport readers to the impossible edges of our world and vivify characters who reflect the spectrum of human experience.
Sarah will read from her work and discuss all things short stories with Taryn Bowe, MWPA’s Associate Director.
Sarah Braunstein's new novel, Bad Animals, was published by W. W. Norton in March 2024 and described by Claire Luchette in the New York Times Book Review as "...a red-hot poker that skewers the limits of the white imagination…[A] sharp-witted, ravishing novel.” Sarah is also the author of The Sweet Relief of Missing Children (W. W. Norton), winner of the 2012 Maine Literary Award for Fiction.
Her short stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Playboy, The Harvard Review, The Cincinnati Review, AGNI, Ploughshares, The Sun, Nylon Magazine, The Nervous Breakdown, and in other publications. She co-wrote a play, String Theory: Three Greek Myths Woven Together, with Michael Barakiva and Amy Boyce Holtcamp.
Sarah has been the recipient of a “5 Under 35” award from the National Book Foundation and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an MSW from Smith College School for Social Work. She is associate professor of English and creative writing at Colby College.