Barbara Ehrenreich, an activist, journalist, and author of more than twenty books, had died at age eighty-one. In 2012, she founded the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, a program to support independent journalists and foster stories about inequality and poverty. Discussing the impetus for the project in a 2020 New Yorker interview with Jia Tolentino, Ehrenreich recalls writing stories for the New York Times Sunday Review about the recession, a project that she lost money on: “I thought, What kind of bullshit is this? Only rich people can write about poverty? That’s when the idea of E.H.R.P. came to my mind.”
The new issue of Bookforum is online now, with a cover story on Lynne Tillman’s new memoir of elder care and ambivalence, Mothercare. Also in the issue: novelists and writers on what to read now, Charlie Tyson on Darryl Pinckney and Elizabeth Hardwick, Charlotte Shane on Rachel Aviv, Lucy Sante on Emmanuel Carrère’s latest, and much more.
The 2022 Hugo Awards have been announced.
At The Baffler, novelist-memoirist Justin Taylor writes an epic diary about “the venerable, dorky, transcendent, irredeemable jam band Phish, who I have loved with reservation since I was a teenager.”
The literary agent Sterling Lord—who represented Ken Kesey, Erica Jong, the young Jack Kerouac, and many others—has died at 102.