The Guy in the Box: A Short Story Collection

In this extraordinary new collection, award-winning writer Iain Baird brings to life characters as real as we are to ourselves. It is with powerful, graceful, and precise language that Baird shows us how wonderfully perilous ordinary lives can be.

The Guy in the Box, a short emotional literary fiction, captures the audience with sheer rawness that comes from the first stage of denial and having a loved one with dementia. In other selections, whether a damaged veteran reinventing himself in the alleys of the French Quarter, a Halloween prank turning tragically awry, or an aging couple making one final grasp at independence, Baird shows us what it is to be fully human. These flawed, yet majestic, unforgettable characters bring the stories to life with suspense, humor, and discovery.

Iain Baird’s story collection, The Guy in the Box, promises to intellectually engage and delight readers as he explores the human condition with both humor and insight. Those who discovered Baird’s memoir, Two Storms, will know they are once again in the hands of a master story teller.

Laura Oliver, author of The Story Within. (Penguin Random House) Award winning author of essay and fiction and Creative Writing Instructor, St. Johns College, MD.

In these remarkable tales, Iain Baird lets his fertile imagination run loose over the globe from the Bronx to New Delhi, from the redwoods to Paris in a rainbow of character study and plot twists that we follow, mouth open, in willing suspension of disbelief.

We trail behind Baird's inventions as adolescent mischief morphs into unintended arson and the death of a despised teacher. We watch an aging couple make a final run for independence on a road trip into Mexico. We discover a secret half-sister in India is not a blood sister after all, but a soul sister. A man in late-stage dementia, attending the funeral of a friend, stuns us and the mourners around him, asking "Who's in the box?" A cab fare in New York City is paid with memories of the Khyber Pass.  Two boys, would-be fur traders, trap a muskrat on the banks of the Bronx River. And we're off to Paris where an accidental tourist sits at a cafe table about to be struck by a veering car.

A wide circle of literary magazines has already recognized the unhurried, elegant style of Iain Baird. He deserves a far wider public.

John Rolfe Gardiner, author of Newport Rising