Litquake 2026

FREE

Co-presented with City Lights


In the months after his mother Barbara’s death, author and essayist Ben Ehrenreich set himself the task of writing a story every day. Leaving open the question of what a “story” might be, some entries ended up fable-like tales involving animals doing surprising things. Others were closer to journal entries, many of them about his daughter, who was nearly three at the time, and who was trying to understand death herself at the same time that she was voraciously exploring the living world. This deeply moving collection of those daily journeys into storytelling—a finely crafted combination of fiction, memoir, and poetic prose—is both profound and satisfyingly whimsical. In conversation with Daniel Gumbiner.