Encompassing a wide range of formal approaches and genres, Samuel Rafael Barber captures the disparate manifestations of power and powerlessness in this era of global neoliberalism. The stories in The Box in Which We Live investigate the existential torment inflicted upon marginalized people by individuals, institutions, and states complicit in oppression. Across these experiments, a comic absurdity emerges and a distance grows between the individual and the collective in a media-oversaturated world.
“I alternated between laughter and admiration reading the darkly comic, metafictional pieces in 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
