Judy Budnitz writes transcendent stories about things that really matter and she writes in a way that allows the reader the privilege of thinking from the inside out. In Nice Big American Baby, out in paperback this month, there is a combination of eloquent storytelling, bleak humor, and ironic insight woven — with a dash of the fantastic — into our deeply familiar modern landscape. There is remarkable control to these twelve stories and Budnitz never plays it safe. She delivers stories that transport us "deep" into the center of what it means to be human and we are left dazed and thankful for what we've never seen quite in the same way before but can't help but recognize.

The prose is fluid, modern and realistic as in the short story, "nadia" about one woman's obsessive interest toward her friend Joel's male order bride from Eastern Europe... " We could not get the picture out of our heads: Nadia ripped from the arms of... someone. By... someone. That part is hazy. We see the hands reaching out, Nadia crying silently. Women with kerchiefs on their heads weeping, men with huge mustaches looking stern, children hugging her knees. Nadia's chin upraised, throat exposed, martyr light in her eyes. Her shabby relations counting the money and raising their hands to the heavens in thanks, the starving children already stuffing their mouths with bread. It would make a nice painting. Nadia standing among the shadows and grubby faces with a shaft of light falling on her, the way it always does no matter where she stands. Then again maybe we've seen too many movies."

Whether it be a pregnant woman's many harrowing attempts to cross the border to have her baby born on American ground in the story "where we come from," or the blurred identities and lack of boundaries between a mother getting a cancer screening and her adult daughters in the story "Flush," Judy Budnitz allows the reader moments of true trespass, of magnified "vision." Ordinary, mundane emotional attachments are activated and portrayed as marvelously strange. The writing is always remarkably agile, as in this small scene from "flush" when the narrator and her mother enter a parking garage on their way for the older woman's mammogram: " Now she was fiddling with her rearview mirror and straightening her skirt. "Come on" I said, watching the bar, which was still raised and vibrating a little. "Relax, honey, that thing isn't going to come crashing down on us the minute we're under it. I promise you." "I know that," I said, and then closed my eyes until we were through the gate and weaving around the dark oil-stained aisles of the parking garage. I would have liked to tell her about some of the legal cases Mitch had described to me: freak accidents, threshing machines gone awry, people caught in giant gears or conveyor belts and torn limb from limb, hands in bread slicers, flimsy walkways over vats of acid. Elevator cases, diving-board cases, subway-train cases, drowing-in-the-bathtub cases, electrocution-by-blender cases. And then there were the ones that were just called Acts of God. I didn't tell her. "Remember where we parked," she said."

There is cumulative power here, Judy Budnitz is the real deal and strikes the dart into the bull's eye again and again. It is marvelous to watch! These stories are magnetic and irresistible. There is an unflinching inquiry that is addictive about a story by Judy Budnitz, something magical, fantastic—oddly haunting, disturbing and dream-like, mercilessly masterful.