Rebecca Solnit – författare

'An old world is dying; a new world is being born; now is the time of monsters' Antonio GramschiSolnit maps the extraordinary revolution of ideas and rights that we've experienced over the last fifty years, which has profoundly changed our world. In recognising the interdependent and symbiotic relationships in nature and among humans, this revolution is beginning to overturn capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy and the human domination of nature - despite the best efforts of the old world to fight back. From one of the most significant thinkers of our day, The Beginning Comes After the End is a culmination of years of activism and offers a unique perspective on our politics and our humanity, to give hope in difficult times and to urgently remind us that the power to change the world is within our reach.

"Gå vilse" är en bok om ovisshet av många olika slag ? ovisshet om var man befinner sig i terrängen eller det egna livet. Den handlar också om ovissheten som konstnärligt verktyg och som historisk erfarenhet, om Yves Klein och hans märkliga blå färg och om nybyggardottern Mary Jemison och hennes långa liv bland indianerna. Och om mycket annat och många andra. Det är en bok om landskap inuti landskap, rum inuti rum. ??Att aldrig gå vilse är att inte leva, att inte veta hur man går vilse leder till undergång, och någonstans i det terra incognita som ligger mittemellan finns ett liv där man upptäcker saker.? Rebecca Solnit (född 1961) är kulturkritiker och aktivist från San Francisco och har bland skrivit den uppmärksammade "Män förklarar saker för mig". "Solnits närvaro, öppenhet och förståelse är underbar, hon är som en generös vän, bara mycket smartare än du själv. Det är fantastisk läsning." /Jenny Maria Nilsson i Helsingborgs Dagblad "'Gå vilse' är inte en bok som coachar en på rätta vägen eller visar hur man hittar hem. Snarare en stimulerande och märkligt upplyftande plädering för terra incognita, det vi förbiser, inte vet, det obelysta och förlorade i historien." /Pia Bergström i Aftonbladet "Det här är förstås en fantastisk bok, på många sätt: den argumenterar varsamt, berikar, öppnar för idéer, uppslag." /Björn Kohlström i bloggen Bernur

At a time when political, environmental and social gloom can seem overpowering, this remarkable book offers a lucid, affirmative and well-argued case for hope. This exquisite work traces a history of activism and social change over the past five decades - from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the worldwide marches against the war in Iraq. Hope in the Dark is a paean to optimism in the uncertainty of the twenty-first century. Tracing the footsteps of the last century's thinkers - including Woolf, Gandhi, Borges, Benjamin and Havel - Solnit conjures a timeless vision of cause and effect that will light our way through the dark, and lead us to profound and effective political engagement.

Rebecca Solnits essä "Män förklarar saker för mig" har redan fått något av en feministisk klassikerstatus. Denna vidräkning med självupptagna kulturmän som aldrig vill sluta prata och olika former av subtilt eller inte så värst subtilt kvinnoförtryck publicerades ursprungligen på TomDispatch.com 2008. Essän väckte ett starkt gensvar på nätet och ledde till att uttrycket "mansplaining" myntades. I föreliggande bok får essän sällskap av åtta besläktade texter av senare datum. Solnit tar här bland annat upp våldtäktsanklagelserna mot den dåvarande chefen för Internationella valuta­fonden, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, 2011 och döds­skjutningarna på ett campus i Isla Vista i Kalifornien 2014. Men hon fördjupar sig också i bildkonst (Ana Teresa Fernández) och litteratur (Virginia Woolf). Det finns, skriver Solnit, "ett kontinuum som går från smärre olägenheter i samhället till nedtystande och dödligt våld". Vi skulle förstå våldet mot kvinnor bättre om vi hade mer av en helhetssyn på maktmissbruket i samhället och tydligare kunde urskilja det mönster som förenar kvinnoförakt, trakasserier, näthat, våldtäkter och mord. Solnits vill bidra till en sådan helhetssyn. Och gjuta mod i alla (kvinnor och män) som tror på och kämpar för en förändring till det bättre. Daidalos har av Solnit tidigare publicerat Gå vilse. En fälthandbok (2012) och Det avlägset nära (2014), associativa och vindlande och bitvis poetiska texter där platser och berättelser står i fokus. "Män talar, kvinnor förväntas lyssna. Rebecca Solnit visar kristallklart upp det maktspel som pågår, skriver Hanna Jedvik som läst en feministisk klassiker" /Göteborg-Posten

This book's title, No Straight Road Takes You There, is an evocation and a declaration. Highways tend to be built across the easy routes and flat places, or the landscape is cleared away - logged, graded, levelled, tunnelled through - but to stick to these roads is to miss what else is out there. In her writing and activism, Rebecca Solnit has sought the pathless places in order to celebrate indirect and unpredictable consequences, and to embrace slowness and imperfection, which, she argues, are key to understanding the possibilities of change.In her latest essay collection, the award-winning writer explores responses to the climate crisis, as well as reflections on women's rights, the fight for democracy, the trends in masculinity, and the rise of the far right in the West. Incantatory and poetic, positive and engaging, these essays argue for the long-term view and the power of collective action, making a case for seeding change wherever possible, and offering us all a path out of the wilderness.

'Radical, humane, witty' Alain de Botton 'Magisterial' Will Self, GuardianExplore historical, political and philosophical paths traced by walkers in this profound and diverting modern classic.What does it mean to be out walking in the world, whether in a landscape or a metropolis, on a pilgrimage or a protest march? In this first general history of walking, Rebecca Solnit draws together numerous stories to create a new way of looking at one of humanity's most fundamental and expressive acts. Arguing that walking as history means walking for pleasure and for political, aesthetic, and social meaning, Solnit homes in on the walkers whose everyday and extreme acts have shaped our culture, from the philosophers of ancient Greece to the poets of the Romantic Age, from the perambulations of the Surrealists to the ascents of mountaineers. With profiles of some of the most significant walkers in history and fiction - from Wordsworth to Gary Snyder, from Rousseau to Argentina's Mother of the Plaza de Mayo, from Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennet to Andre Breton's Nadja - Wanderlust takes us on an unforgettable journey and shows how walking can affect the body, the imagination, and the world around us.'One of those rare, quirky, rather lovable books that makes you look anew at something so familiar ... Solnit winningly traces the shifting cultural significance of putting one foot in front of another' Daily Telegraph

How do we respond to disaster? What expressions of care and solidarity might we find among the debris? A Paradise Built in Hell is a study of five major disasters - the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the Halifax explosion of 1917, the Mexico City earthquake of 1985, the 9/11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina - and the expressions of altruism, generosity and resourcefulness that emerged in the wake of these tragedies. The result is a sweeping history of some of the foundational events in the modern history of North America, and a meditation on community: challenging us to look afresh at society, and what these models of local, collaborative politics might look like carried through into everyday life.

"Det är en av de behagligaste och mest bildande läsupplevelserna jag har haft" /Sinziana Ravini i GP Att gå till fots är inte bara att förflytta sig från en punkt till en annan. Det är också att ingå i ett sammanhang, befinna sig mitt i ett konkret och påtagligt landskap, ta del av alla de processer som ständigt pågår runt omkring en. Och det kan dessutom vara ett sätt att tänka och känna, eftersom själva gåendet har en egendomlig förmåga att stimulera våra sinnen och minnen och ge oss perspektiv också på sådant som inte finns där och då. Rebecca Solnits "Wanderlust" undersöker vad det innebär – och har inneburit – att gå till fots genom världen och vad författare, konstnärer, tänkare och andra har haft att säga om den saken. Solnit knyter till exempel an till antikens ständigt i rörelse stadda filosofer och låter oss följa med romantikens poeter på deras vandringar genom dramatiska och undersköna landskap. Men Wanderlust är också en ur fotgängarperspektiv skriven bok om surrealisternas outtömliga Parismiljöer och spelmanins neonglittrande Las Vegas. Det handlar om kulturhistoria i rymligast tänkbara bemärkelse – och om en genomtänkt kritik av vårt nuvarande och på många sätt inkapslade och inkapslande livsmönster. Själva gåendet kan dessutom, framhåller Solnit, få en subversiv kollektiv dimension. Protestmarscher handlar ju inte heller bara om att förflytta sig från en punkt till en annan. Wanderlust är en bok som intar en central position i Solnits författarskap genom att förena den mer associativa och personliga reflektionsformen i "Gå vilse" och "Det avlägset nära" med de makt- och kulturkritiska resonemangen och den politiska analysen i Män förklarar saker för mig och andra av hennes böcker.

A reissue of this inspiring and heartbreaking memoir about family, empathy and the stories we tell about ourselves and othersGifts come in many guises. One summer, Rebecca Solnit was given three boxes of ripening apricots, fruit from a neglected tree that her mother, gradually succumbing to memory loss, could no longer tend to.In this courageous, heartbreaking memoir, Solnit draws from this unexpected inheritance, weaving her own story into fairy tales and the lives of others. Encompassing the Marquis de Sade and Mary Shelley, explorers and monsters, a library of water in Iceland, and the depths of the Grand Canyon, The Faraway Nearby is a meditation on family, empathy, and the art of storytelling from a writer of limitless talent and imagination.

In 1872, Eadward Muybridge - a British photographer, who had landed in California during the Gold Rush - captured images of high-speed movement. These photographs would go on to lay the foundations for motion pictures, changing the west coast of America, and the world, forever. River of Shadows is both a bold and original biography of a true pioneer - his trailblazing work, and his complicated life - and a portrait of America on the threshold of modernity. Drawing lines from Muybridge's invention to Hollywood and Silicon Valley, Rebecca Solnit explores how this remarkable breakthrough has shaped the world today.

Published as a standalone on International Woman's Day, the essay that became a touchstone of the feminist movement and inspired the term 'mansplaining', with an afterword on its originsThis famous and influential essay, which describes the time when, at a party, a man explained to Rebecca Solnit the argument of her own book, inspired the term 'mansplaining' and established Solnit as a vital figure of the feminist movement, and one of the leading thinkers of our time. Fierce, incisive and funny, it exposes the inherent sexism of our patriarchal culture.

In the winter of 1945-6, George Orwell was recently widowed, in poor health and living in bombed-out London under the deprivations of rationing – yet in this unpromising context, he wrote a series of essays celebrating the small joys of everyday life. This new anthology, edited by Rebecca Solnit, challenges the dominant image of Orwell as the austere author of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm. He instead emerges as an enthusiast of English cooking; a lover of gardening and the countryside; a leisurely pub drinker; an observer of the elm tree and blackbird’s song; a devotee of murder mystery novels and ‘good bad books’.These essays were not escapist for Orwell; rather, they deepened his political commitments. Attending to the world through the senses, trusting your own judgement and valuing ordinary joys are ways of preserving individuality and humanity in the face of propaganda, totalitarianism and despair. These small pleasures, far from trivial, became for Orwell fortifications of the self.

Rebecca Solnit has made a vocation of journeying into difficult territory and reporting back, as an environmentalist, antiglobalization activist, and public intellectual. "Storming the Gates of Paradise", an anthology of her essential essays from the past ten years, takes the reader from the Pyrenees to the U.S.-Mexican border, from San Francisco to London, from open sky to the deepest mines, and from the antislavery struggles of two hundred years ago to today's street protests. The nearly forty essays collected here comprise a unique guidebook to the American landscape after the millennium - not just the deserts, skies, gardens, and wilderness areas that have long made up Solnit's subject matter, but the social landscape of democracy and repression, of borders, ruins, and protests.She ventures into territories as dark as prison and as sublime as a broad vista, revealing beauty in the harshest landscape and political struggle in the most apparently serene view.Her introduction sets the tone and the book's overarching themes as she describes Thoreau, leaving the jail cell where he had been confined for refusing to pay war taxes and proceeding directly to his favorite huckleberry patch. In this way she links pleasure to politics, brilliantly demonstrating that the path to paradise has often run through prison. These startling insights on current affairs, politics, culture, and history, always expressed in Solnit's pellucid and graceful prose, constantly revise our views of the otherwise ordinary and familiar. Illustrated throughout, "Storming the Gates of Paradise" represents recent developments in Solnit's thinking and offers the reader a panoramic world view enriched by her characteristically provocative, inspiring, and hopeful observations.

What makes a place? "Infinite City", Rebecca Solnit's brilliant reinvention of the traditional atlas, searches out the answer by examining the many layers of meaning in one place, the San Francisco Bay Area. Aided by artists, writers, cartographers, and twenty-two gorgeous color maps, each of which illuminates the city and its surroundings as experienced by different inhabitants, Solnit takes us on a tour that will forever change the way we think about place. She explores the area thematically - connecting, for example, Eadweard Muybridge's foundation of motion-picture technology with Alfred Hitchcock's filming of "Vertigo". Across an urban grid of just seven by seven miles, she finds seemingly unlimited landmarks and treasures - butterfly habitats, queer sites, murders, World War II shipyards, blues clubs, Zen Buddhist centers. She roams the political terrain, both progressive and conservative, and details the cultural geographies of the Mission District, the culture wars of the Fillmore, the South of Market world being devoured by redevelopment, and much, much more.Breathtakingly original, this atlas of the imagination invites us to search out the layers of San Francisco that carry meaning for us - or to discover our own infinite city, be it Cleveland, Toulouse, or Shanghai. Contributors include: Cartographers - Ben Pease and Shizue Seigel; Designer - Lia Tjandra; Artists - Sandow Birk, Mona Caron, Jaime Cortez, Hugh D'Andrade, Robert Dawson, Paz de la Calzada, Jim Herrington, Ira Nowinski, Alison Pebworth, Michael Rauner, Gent Sturgeon and Sunaura Taylor; Writers and researchers - Summer Brenner, Adriana Camarena, Chris Carlsson, Lisa Conrad, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, Paul La Farge, Genine Lentine, Stella Lochman, Aaron Shurin, Heather Smith and Richard Walker; and, Additional cartography - Darin Jensen, Robin Grossinger and Ruth Askevold, as well as San Francisco Estuary Institute.

What makes a place? "Infinite City", Rebecca Solnit's brilliant reinvention of the traditional atlas, searches out the answer by examining the many layers of meaning in one place, the San Francisco Bay Area. Aided by artists, writers, cartographers, and twenty-two gorgeous color maps, each of which illuminates the city and its surroundings as experienced by different inhabitants, Solnit takes us on a tour that will forever change the way we think about place. She explores the area thematically - connecting, for example, Eadweard Muybridge's foundation of motion-picture technology with Alfred Hitchcock's filming of "Vertigo". Across an urban grid of just seven by seven miles, she finds seemingly unlimited landmarks and treasures - butterfly habitats, queer sites, murders, World War II shipyards, blues clubs, Zen Buddhist centers. She roams the political terrain, both progressive and conservative, and details the cultural geographies of the Mission District, the culture wars of the Fillmore, the South of Market world being devoured by redevelopment, and much, much more.Breathtakingly original, this atlas of the imagination invites us to search out the layers of San Francisco that carry meaning for us - or to discover our own infinite city, be it Cleveland, Toulouse, or Shanghai. Contributors include: Cartographers - Ben Pease and Shizue Seigel; Designer - Lia Tjandra; Artists - Sandow Birk, Mona Caron, Jaime Cortez, Hugh D'Andrade, Robert Dawson, Paz de la Calzada, Jim Herrington, Ira Nowinski, Alison Pebworth, Michael Rauner, Gent Sturgeon and Sunaura Taylor; Writers and researchers - Summer Brenner, Adriana Camarena, Chris Carlsson, Lisa Conrad, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, Paul La Farge, Genine Lentine, Stella Lochman, Aaron Shurin, Heather Smith and Richard Walker; and, Additional cartography - Darin Jensen, Robin Grossinger and Ruth Askevold, as well as San Francisco Estuary Institute.

Like the bestselling Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, this book is a brilliant reinvention of the traditional atlas, one that provides a vivid, complex look at the multi-faceted nature of New Orleans, a city replete with contradictions. More than twenty essays assemble a chorus of vibrant voices, including geographers, scholars of sugar and bananas, the city's remarkable musicians, prison activists, environmentalists, Arab and Native voices, and local experts, as well as the coauthors' compelling contributions. Featuring 22 full-color two-page-spread maps, Unfathomable City plumbs the depths of this major tourist destination, pivotal scene of American history and culture and, most recently, site of monumental disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill. The innovative maps' precision and specificity shift our notions of the Mississippi, the Caribbean, Mardi Gras, jazz, soils and trees, generational roots, and many other subjects, and expand our ideas of how any city is imagined and experienced.Together with the inspired texts, they show New Orleans as both an imperiled city - by erosion, crime, corruption, and sea level rise - and an ageless city that lives in music as a form of cultural resistance. Compact, lively, and completely original, Unfathomable City takes readers on a tour that will forever change the way they think about place.

Like the bestselling Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, this book is a brilliant reinvention of the traditional atlas, one that provides a vivid, complex look at the multi-faceted nature of New Orleans, a city replete with contradictions. More than twenty essays assemble a chorus of vibrant voices, including geographers, scholars of sugar and bananas, the city's remarkable musicians, prison activists, environmentalists, Arab and Native voices, and local experts, as well as the coauthors' compelling contributions. Featuring 22 full-color two-page-spread maps, Unfathomable City plumbs the depths of this major tourist destination, pivotal scene of American history and culture and, most recently, site of monumental disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill. The innovative maps' precision and specificity shift our notions of the Mississippi, the Caribbean, Mardi Gras, jazz, soils and trees, generational roots, and many other subjects, and expand our ideas of how any city is imagined and experienced.Together with the inspired texts, they show New Orleans as both an imperiled city - by erosion, crime, corruption, and sea level rise - and an ageless city that lives in music as a form of cultural resistance. Compact, lively, and completely original, Unfathomable City takes readers on a tour that will forever change the way they think about place.

"A beautiful, absorbing, tragic book."--Larry McMurtry In 1851, a war began in what would become Yosemite National Park, a war against the indigenous inhabitants. A century later--in 1951--and a hundred and fifty miles away, another war began when the U.S. government started setting off nuclear bombs at the Nevada Test Site. It was called a nuclear testing program, but functioned as a war against the land and people of the Great Basin. In this foundational book of landscape theory and environmental thinking, Rebecca Solnit explores our national Eden and Armageddon and offers a pathbreaking history of the west, focusing on the relationship between culture and its implementation as politics. In a new preface, she considers the continuities and changes of these invisible wars in the context of our current climate change crisis, and reveals how the long arm of these histories continue to inspire her writing and hope.

"The maps themselves are things of beauty...a document of its time, of our time." -Sadie Stein, New York Times "One is invited to fathom the many New Yorks hidden from history's eye...thoroughly terrific." -Maria Popova, Brain Pickings Nonstop Metropolis, the culminating volume in a trilogy of atlases, conveys innumerable unbound experiences of New York City through twenty-six imaginative maps and informative essays. Bringing together the insights of dozens of experts-from linguists to music historians, ethnographers, urbanists, and environmental journalists-amplified by cartographers, artists, and photographers, it explores all five boroughs of New York City and parts of nearby New Jersey. We are invited to travel through Manhattan's playgrounds, from polyglot Queens to many-faceted Brooklyn, and from the resilient Bronx to the mystical kung fu hip-hop mecca of Staten Island. The contributors to this exquisitely designed and gorgeously illustrated volume celebrate New York City's unique vitality, its incubation of the avant-garde, and its literary history, but they also critique its racial and economic inequality, environmental impact, and erasure of its past.Nonstop Metropolis allows us to excavate New York's buried layers, to scrutinize its political heft, and to discover the unexpected in one of the most iconic cities in the world. It is both a challenge and homage to how New Yorkers think of their city, and how the world sees this capital of capitalism, culture, immigration, and more. Contributors: Sheerly Avni, Gaiutra Bahadur, Marshall Berman, Joe Boyd, Will Butler, Garnette Cadogan, Thomas J. Campanella, Daniel Aldana Cohen, Teju Cole, Joel Dinerstein, Paul La Farge, Francisco Goldman, Margo Jefferson, Lucy R. Lippard, Barry Lopez, Valeria Luiselli, Suketu Mehta, Emily Raboteau, Molly Roy, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Luc Sante, Heather Smith, Jonathan Tarleton, Astra Taylor, Alexandra T. Vazquez, Christina Zanfagna Interviews with: Valerie Capers, Peter Coyote, Grandmaster Caz, Grand Wizzard Theodore, Melle Mel, RZA

"The maps themselves are things of beauty...a document of its time, of our time." -Sadie Stein, New York Times "One is invited to fathom the many New Yorks hidden from history's eye...thoroughly terrific." -Maria Popova, Brain Pickings Nonstop Metropolis, the culminating volume in a trilogy of atlases, conveys innumerable unbound experiences of New York City through twenty-six imaginative maps and informative essays. Bringing together the insights of dozens of experts-from linguists to music historians, ethnographers, urbanists, and environmental journalists-amplified by cartographers, artists, and photographers, it explores all five boroughs of New York City and parts of nearby New Jersey. We are invited to travel through Manhattan's playgrounds, from polyglot Queens to many-faceted Brooklyn, and from the resilient Bronx to the mystical kung fu hip-hop mecca of Staten Island. The contributors to this exquisitely designed and gorgeously illustrated volume celebrate New York City's unique vitality, its incubation of the avant-garde, and its literary history, but they also critique its racial and economic inequality, environmental impact, and erasure of its past.Nonstop Metropolis allows us to excavate New York's buried layers, to scrutinize its political heft, and to discover the unexpected in one of the most iconic cities in the world. It is both a challenge and homage to how New Yorkers think of their city, and how the world sees this capital of capitalism, culture, immigration, and more. Contributors: Sheerly Avni, Gaiutra Bahadur, Marshall Berman, Joe Boyd, Will Butler, Garnette Cadogan, Thomas J. Campanella, Daniel Aldana Cohen, Teju Cole, Joel Dinerstein, Paul La Farge, Francisco Goldman, Margo Jefferson, Lucy R. Lippard, Barry Lopez, Valeria Luiselli, Suketu Mehta, Emily Raboteau, Molly Roy, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Luc Sante, Heather Smith, Jonathan Tarleton, Astra Taylor, Alexandra T. Vazquez, Christina Zanfagna Interviews with: Valerie Capers, Peter Coyote, Grandmaster Caz, Grand Wizzard Theodore, Melle Mel, RZA

"The maps themselves are things of beauty."—The New York Times  Explore the hidden histories of San Francisco, New Orleans, and New York with this brilliant reinvention of the traditional atlas. From Rebecca Solnit, Rebecca Snedeker, and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro.  In the past decade, Rebecca Solnit—aided by local writers, artists, historians, urbanists, ethnographers, and cartographers—has compiled three stunning atlases that have radically changed the way we think about place. Each atlas provides a vivid, complex look at the multi-faceted nature of a city as experienced by its different inhabitants, replete with the celebrations and contradictions that make up urban life.  This three-volume paperback set contains: The original, gorgeously designed atlases—Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas; Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas; and Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas Three new and updated, full-color, fold-out posters for each city, including the popular “City of Women” mapA new and thoughtful essay by Rebecca Solnit reflecting on the project ten years after the publication of the first atlas  A stunning collection, this boxed set is a perfect treasury of imagination and insight, a rich people’s history of these infinite cities.

In times of crisis, when institutions of power are laid bare, people turn to one another. Pandemic Solidarity collects firsthand experiences from around the world of people creating their own narratives of solidarity and mutual aid in the time of the global crisis of Covid-19.The world’s media was quick to weave a narrative of selfish individualism, full of empty supermarket shelves and con-men. However, if you scratch the surface, you find a different story of community and self-sacrifice. Looking at eighteen countries and regions, including India, Rojava, Taiwan, South Africa, Iraq and North America, the personal accounts in the book weave together to create a larger picture, revealing a universality of experience - a housewife in Istanbul supports her neighbour in the same way as a teacher in Argentina, a punk in Portland, and a disability activist in South Korea does.Moving beyond the present, these stories reveal what an alternative society could look like, and reflect the skills and relationships we already have to create that society, challenging institutions of power that have already shown their fragility.