Books

The Box in Which We Live

University of Iowa Press; November 17, 2026; Winner of the 2026 John Simmons Short Fiction Award

"I alternated laughter and admiration reading the darkly comic, metafictional pieces in Samuel Rafael Barber’s The Box in Which We Live, even as I tried to locate the source of its absurdist charm and off-kilter wisdom. Are these stories Beckettian? Borgesian? Barthelmeic? Am I getting hints of Steven Millhauser, or Robert Coover, or Lydia Davis? Or, someday, might such original linguistic and thematic playfulness be described as Barberian." — Jess Walter, judge, John Simmons Short Fiction Award

“Animated by the postmodern spirit of Roberto Bolaño, David Markson, and Ben Lerner, Barber’s stories try on whatever form they can—lecture notes, a choose-your-own adventure, a dreaded exam—to yank our attention to the horrifying power of our insipid politics. Barber is that rare thing in a debut writer: a fearless and true original.”— Manuel Muñoz, author, The Consequences

“Forged in Kafka’s absurdism, but with the scathing wit of Donald Barthelme, Roberto Bolaño, and Thomas Pynchon, The Box in Which We Live pulls no punches in this celebrity roast of history’s fraudsters, charlatans, and pencil pushers en route to their self-actualization as oligarchs, puppet dictators, hedge-funders, tech overlords, and alt-right messiahs. Maybe no one ever expects a junta, but when it comes to late-stage capitalism, everything is there in the formation, Barber shows us, as he brilliantly rides the knife’s edge of humor within the banality of evil.”— Joanna Howard, author, Porthole

“Here they come: Señora O’Shaughnessy, Professor Barkley-Peters-Bök, Queequeg the cat—and Samuel Rafael Barber, the phenom behind these and other splendid inventions. The Box in Which We Live is a book of brilliant mischief.”— Jason Schwartz, author, John the Posthumous

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Press

“Our systems crush us, our language fails us, and our choices mean nothing. The outlook of The Box in Which We Live is bleak and unremitting. None of these stories could fuel a viral George Saunders interview, and none of them offers his or Smiley’s comforting liberal faith in one person’s power. Yet far from spreading its bleakness to the reader, the book induces a kind of paradoxical reaction. The form of the book itself—the politics inherent in its form—becomes not a palliative but a collective. Despite himself, Barber has crafted not a miserable book but a validating one. The narrators have no one to speak to in their individual stories, and no idea of a future. But within the collection, bundled together, they speak to each other.” - Cleveland Review of Books

“By the end of the collection, the title feels less like an explanation than a provocation. The question is not simply what confines us, but how those confines become so familiar that we cease to recognize them as such. Barber's answer is not delivered in a single argument or story. It emerges through the accumulation of voices, forms, characters, jokes, and unsettling observations.” - Latino Literary Review