Economics

Largely set in Boston, Fanny Howe's Economics examines with an unwavering eye the necessary errors of the 1960s liberalism and consequences of Cold War politics. A white liberal couple adopts a black child with troubling results; two old friends from the Kennedy campaign meet years later to discover how different their lives have become; a separated working-class couple drives to the Cape to collect the prize from an instant lotto game. In each story, love is eroded by class expectations and financial pressures, by racial tensions and ideological hypocrisies. As a result, Economics offers a raw portrait of the last three decades that is at once comic and devastating.

Fanny Howe is a prolific poet, novelist and essayist. She has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lenore Marshall Award, and the Ruth Lilly Lifetime Achievement Award, among other recognitions. Born in Buffalo, New York in 1940, she is Professor Emerita of Writing and Literature at the University of California, San Diego and now lives in Boston, Massachusetts.