Nice Big American Baby

By Judy Budnitz. <i>Alfred A. Knopf. $23</i>

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The buzz is right: The short story is making a comeback. For proof, look no further than the spare, pol- ished gems in Judy Budnitz’s Nice Big American Baby.

Budnitz writes fantastic and grotesque stories that nonetheless feel deeply familiar. In “Nadia,” a man brings home a mail-order wife from a war-torn eastern European country. Her inscrutability evokes jealousy from his thirtysomething female friends, and the tale’s final twist would not be out of place in an especially warped and revealing episode of Sex and the City.

In the dreamlike “Where We Come From,” a pregnant woman is so desperate to give birth on American soil that she holds her child inside her womb as she spends years trying to sneak across the border. There are moments when a story’s internal rules seem too flexible, but such slips are redeemed by Budnitz’s overall precision, depth, and humor.

In “Preparedness,” a story about sex, death, and emergency shelters, Budnitz captures a small but essential truth of the past four years. When a presidential adviser forgets himself and blurts out “hold your horses” to his boss: “There was a general gasp. The President glared. Only the President was allowed to season his speech with the odd folksy idiom.”

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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