Rebecca Solnit

"In this memoir, celebrated author, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit relates how she found her voice as a writer and as a feminist during the 1980s in San Francisco, in an atmosphere of gender violence on the street and the exclusion of women from cultural arenas. Then in her early twenties, Solnit tells of being poor, hopeful, and adrift in the city, which became her great teacher; of the small apartment she found, which became a home in which...

With Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit makes a radical case for hope as a commitment to act in a world whose future remains uncertain and unknowable. Drawing on her decades of activism and a wide reading of environmental, cultural, and political history, Solnit argued that radicals have a long, neglected history of transformative victories, that the positive consequences of our acts are not always immediately seen, directly knowable, or even measurable,...

"In this powerful and wide-ranging collection of essays, Solnit turns her attention to the war at home. This is a war, she says, "with so many casualties that we should call it by its true name, this war with so many dead by police, by violent ex-husbands and partners and lovers, by people pursuing power and profit at the point of a gun or just shooting first and figuring out who they hit later." To get to the root of these American crises, she contends...

Who gets to shape the narrative of our times? The current moment is a battle royale over that foundational power, one in which women, people of color, non-straight people are telling other versions, and white people and men and particularly white men are trying to hang onto the old versions and their own centrality. In Whose Story Is This? Rebecca Solnit appraises what's emerging and why it matters and what the obstacles are.

In this modern twist on the classic story, Cinderella, who would rather just be Ella, meets her fairy godmother, goes to a ball, and makes friends with a prince. But that is where the familiar story ends. Instead of waiting to be rescued, Cinderella learns that she can save herself and those around her by being true to herself and standing up for what she believes.

Strangely positioned between Europe and the postcolonial world, Ireland occupies a fluid and contradictory space, not least in the memory or imagination of its many emigrants. In this sensitive exploration of the culture of others, Rebecca Solnit returns to Ireland, armed with a newly-acquired Irish passport - courtesy of otherwise forgotten maternal ancestors. Her journey is not to find stable identity in ancestral roots but to confront notions of...

In her comic, scathing essay Men Explain Things to Me, Rebecca Solnit takes on what often goes wrong in conversations between men and women. She writes about men who wrongly assume they know things and wrongly assume women don't, about why this arises, and how this aspect of the gender wars works, airing some of her own hilariously awful encounters. Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of sixteen books about environment, landscape,...

Un fascinante retrato de la infinita gama de posibilidades que se presentan a pie. Analizando temas que van desde la evolución anatómica hasta el diseño de las ciudades, pasando por las cintas de correr, los clubes de senderismo y las costumbres sexuales, Solnit sostiene que las diferentes variantes del desplazamiento pedestre —incluido caminar por placer— suponen una acción política, estética y de gran significado social. Para ello se centra...

“An intriguing amalgam of personal memoir, philosophical speculation, natural lore, cultural history, and art criticism.” —Los Angeles Times
From the award-winning author of Orwell's Roses, a stimulating exploration of wandering, being lost, and the uses of the unknown
Written as a series of autobiographical essays, A Field Guide to Getting Lost draws on emblematic moments and relationships...