Sarah Jones offers a remembrance of activist and author Barbara Ehrenreich, who died last week, at Intelligencer. Jones first encountered Ehrenreich’s work when her mother was reading Nickel and Dimed. “What astonished me early about Ehrenreich’s work wasn’t just that she, as an individual, cared about the working poor, but that she could get others to do the same. From my vantage as the daughter of a precarious family, it looked like Ehrenreich had performed a magic trick. With time, though, I came to understand something about how she managed it. Ehrenreich’s power as a social critic is a reflection of her talent as a writer.”
Hernan Diaz, Yoko Tawada, Olga Tokarczuk, Ed Yong, Ann Patchett, and more are among the finalists for the 2022 Kirkus Prizes.
For Metrograph, Rebecca Panovka interviews Whit Stillman, whose films include the “trilogy” of Metropolitan (1990), Barcelona (1994), and The Last Days of Disco (1998). On the question of whether he considers himself “a conservative filmmaker,” Stillman said: “It doesn’t matter how I consider myself. I try to make the films fair, so that someone can come in and interpret it as criticizing or not criticizing, validating or not validating all kinds of different points of view.”
The Sydney Morning Herald has compiled a list of twelve books to read about the British monarchy and the late Queen Elizabeth II’s life.
At Tablet, Marco Roth reviews Rachel Aviv’s debut book, Strangers to Ourselves, and positions Aviv as Janet Malcolm’s heir to the New Yorker’s “unofficial position of ‘psychoanalysis and psychiatry correspondent.’” Reflecting on Aviv’s skepticism of the psychiatric notion of “insight,” Roth writes: “The strength of Janet Malcolm’s work was her ability to understand the pitfalls of Freudian psychiatry and the foibles of its adepts through a Freudian lens. By comparison, Aviv’s pragmatism seeks to dissolve the animating tension of her great predecessor’s approach by ignoring the existence of a reality beyond the shadows on the walls of one’s private cave.” For more on Aviv’s book, see Charlotte Shane’s review in the new issue of Bookforum.
The second issue of Astra magazine will be out on October 11, with contributions by Elif Batuman, Brontez Purnell, Wayne Koestenbaum, Maggie Millner, and more.