BABY IN A BOX

People are funny: Here are 11 interesting stories to prove it.

Somewhat like Art Linkletter’s midcentury radio show and its offshoots, Braunstein’s short fiction creates humor by putting apparently regular people in unusual predicaments and watching what they say and do. Whether they’re funny-peculiar, funny-haha, or both, turns out nobody is all that “regular” after all. In the title story, a 41-year-old diner waitress is sleeping with the 23-year-old cook, who has unfortunately fallen head over heels in love with her. It’s one-sided, so she definitely won’t tell him she’s turned up pregnant and plans to keep the baby. Her favorite customer, a plus-sized beauty named Penny who’s confessed that she once left a baby on a doorstep, decides to butt in. In “Marjorie Lemke,” a 20-year-old motel housekeeper has her own accidental offspring tucked into the cleaning cart she rolls from room to room. Little Della sleeps through the action as her mom, a semiretired sniffer of cleaning products, conducts an affair with a long-term resident whose wife is out during the day. After a while, her lugubrious lover reveals that they’re thinking of having a baby of their own. Marjorie, too, decides to butt in. In “Shavasana,” a slightly potbellied woman who’s not one bit pregnant finds that prenatal yoga classes are just her speed and attends them all over town, switching studios before her non-pregnancy becomes obvious. Then she runs into a former classmate strolling with her infant, and has to do some quick thinking to explain her babylessness. The black humor here is really pretty dark, as it is in the brilliant “Porcupine,” in which the narrator’s attempts to finally land a man with money are thwarted by a sweet but suicidal version of the Talented Mr. Ripley. “Abject Naturalism,” selected for The Best American Short Stories 2025, delivers a sly corrective to the paranoid convictions of a single mother who rushes down the street to investigate the possible predator who’s given her daughter a telescope. And there’s lots more.

The short story form turns out to be the ideal platform for Braunstein’s talents. Her best work to date.