The Box in Which We Live (Iowa Short Fiction Award)

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.