The Box in Which We Live
Samuel Rafael Barber
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How much of our lives do we actually make for ourselves? How much has already been decided by the histories we inherit, the institutions that surround us, the systems we participate in, and the circumstances into which we are born? And what happens to the individual when those forces become so pervasive that they are difficult to distinguish from ordinary life? These are some of the questions animating Samuel Rafael Barber’s The Box in Which We Live, a short-story collection that examines power and powerlessness with an unusual combination of formal experimentation, political sharpness, and wicked humor.
Winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award, The Box in Which We Live moves across an impressive range of genres and structures. Barber seems less interested in observing the traditional boundaries of the short story than in testing how far they can be stretched before they begin to reveal something about the world beyond the page. Perhaps the collection's most impressive accomplishment, however, is Barber's command of voice. He creates an extraordinary range of characters and narrators, each with distinct rhythms, vocabularies, sensibilities, and perspectives. The writing can shift dramatically from one story to the next without losing its sense of control. It is a reminder that versatility is not simply the ability to write in different styles; it is the ability to make different styles feel inhabited. That linguistic range becomes particularly powerful in Barber's satire. He has a sharp ear for the absurdities of political rhetoric, institutional language, intellectual posturing, and the bureaucratic rituals through which power often disguises itself as something ordinary. His humor can be playful and deliberately strange, but there is usually something more pointed underneath it. The laughter is often produced by recognizing how familiar the absurd has become. |
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The darkness beneath that humor should not be underestimated. Barber's stories investigate the effects of oppression on marginalized people and the complicity of individuals, institutions, and states in maintaining systems of power. Yet he resists the temptation to turn these subjects into straightforward political declarations. Instead, he distorts familiar forms and situations until their underlying contradictions become difficult to ignore.
And that may be the most compelling aspect of The Box in Which We Live: its refusal to assume that serious ideas require serious prose. Barber can approach oppression, political power, alienation, and economic systems through a joke, a bureaucratic document, a strange narrator, or an apparently ridiculous premise. The humor does not make the subjects smaller. It gives the reader another way of seeing them.
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.
What stays with the reader is not a single argument or even a single story, but the sensation of having been repeatedly asked to look at familiar things from an unfamiliar angle. Barber's greatest trick may be that he makes the strange recognizable, and the recognizable strange.
Samuel Rafael Barber is a Chicano from South Texas and author of the forthcoming story collection The Box in Which We Live, winner of the 2026 John Simmons Short Fiction Award from the University of Iowa Press. He holds a PhD in English and Literary Arts from the University of Denver, an MFA from the University of Arizona, and an MA in English & Comparative Literature from Columbia. His fiction has appeared in DIAGRAM, Passages North, Quarterly West, Shenandoah, Southwest Review, and Tampa Review, among others.
The Box in Which We Live is a publication by the University of Iowa Press.
And that may be the most compelling aspect of The Box in Which We Live: its refusal to assume that serious ideas require serious prose. Barber can approach oppression, political power, alienation, and economic systems through a joke, a bureaucratic document, a strange narrator, or an apparently ridiculous premise. The humor does not make the subjects smaller. It gives the reader another way of seeing them.
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.
What stays with the reader is not a single argument or even a single story, but the sensation of having been repeatedly asked to look at familiar things from an unfamiliar angle. Barber's greatest trick may be that he makes the strange recognizable, and the recognizable strange.
Samuel Rafael Barber is a Chicano from South Texas and author of the forthcoming story collection The Box in Which We Live, winner of the 2026 John Simmons Short Fiction Award from the University of Iowa Press. He holds a PhD in English and Literary Arts from the University of Denver, an MFA from the University of Arizona, and an MA in English & Comparative Literature from Columbia. His fiction has appeared in DIAGRAM, Passages North, Quarterly West, Shenandoah, Southwest Review, and Tampa Review, among others.
The Box in Which We Live is a publication by the University of Iowa Press.
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