Nice Big American Baby (2005)

Judy Budnitz has a tone all her own. Call it everyday surreal. In ''Where We Come From,'' a woman refuses to give birth for four years — ''She looks like a spider, round, fat body, limbs like sticks'' — as she tries to sneak across the border so her child will be born American. In ''Saving Face,'' an imprisoned woman tells her captors a story of love, obsession, art, and propaganda that explains why she really isn't the reviled prime minister of a mysterious dictatorship. ''Visitors'' channels Joyce Carol Oates and Flannery O'Connor in the story of a pedestrian day gone queasily, perhaps permanently, wrong. Nice Big American Baby is jarring, humane, funny, and so lively it practically buzzes.