New Releases by Rebecca Solnit

“[A] landmark book . . . Solnit illustrates how the uprisings that begin on the streets can upend the status quo and topple authoritarian regimes” (Vice). A book as powerful and influential as Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me, her Hope in the Dark was written to counter the despair of activists at a moment when they were focused on their losses and had turned their back to the victories behind them—and the unimaginable changes soon to come. In it, she 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 argues 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, and that pessimism and despair rest on an unwarranted confidence about what is going to happen next. Now, with a moving new introduction explaining how the book came about and a new afterword that helps teach us how to hope and act in our unnerving world, she brings a new illumination to the darkness of our times in an unforgettable new edition of this classic book. “One of the best books of the 21st century.” —The Guardian “No writer has better understood the mix of fear and possibility, peril and exuberance that’s marked this new millennium.” —Bill McKibben, New York Times–bestselling author of Falter “An elegant reminder that activist victories are easily forgotten, and that they often come in extremely unexpected, roundabout ways.” —The New Yorker

After San Francisco''s new mayor announced imminent plans to clean up downtown with a new corporate dot com corridor and arts district--featuring the new headquarters of Twitter and Burning Man--curators Erick Lyle, Chris Johanson and Kal Spelletich brought over 100 artists and activists together with residents fearing displacement to consider utopian aspirations and plot alternative futures for the city. The resulting exhibition, Streetopia, was a massive anti-gentrification art fair that took place in venues throughout the city, featuring daily free talks, performances, skillshares and a free community kitchen out of the gallery. This book brings together all of the art and ephemera from the now-infamous show, featuring work by Swoon, Barry McGee, Emory Douglas, Monica Canilao, Rigo 23, Xara Thustra, Ryder Cooley and many more. Essays and interviews with key participants consider the effectiveness of Streetopia''s projects while offering a deeper rumination on the continuing search for community in today''s increasingly homogenous and gentrified cities.

The incomparable Rebecca Solnit, author of more than a dozen acclaimed, prizewinning books of nonfiction, brings the same dazzling writing to the essays in Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness. As the title suggests, the territory of Solnit’s concerns is vast, and in her signature alchemical style she combines commentary on history, justice, war and peace, and explorations of place, art, and community, all while writing with the lyricism of a poet to achieve incandescence and wisdom. Gathered here are celebrated iconic essays along with little-known pieces that create a powerful survey of the world we live in, from the jungles of the Zapatistas in Mexico to the splendors of the Arctic. This rich collection tours places as diverse as Haiti and Iceland; movements like Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring; an original take on the question of who did Henry David Thoreau’s laundry; and a searching look at what the hatred of country music really means. Solnit moves nimbly from Orwell to Elvis, to contemporary urban gardening to 1970s California macramé and punk rock, and on to searing questions about the environment, freedom, family, class, work, and friendship. It’s no wonder she’s been compared in Bookforum to Susan Sontag and Annie Dillard and in the San Francisco Chronicle to Joan Didion. The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness proves Rebecca Solnit worthy of the accolades and honors she’s received. Rarely can a reader find such penetrating critiques of our time and its failures leavened with such generous heapings of hope. Solnit looks back to history and the progress of political movements to find an antidote to despair in what many feel as lost causes. In its encyclopedic reach and its generous compassion, Solnit’s collection charts a way through the thickets of our complex social and political worlds. Her essays are a beacon for readers looking for alternative ideas in these imperiled times.

A New York Times Notable Book Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award A personal, lyrical narrative about storytelling and empathy, from the author of Orwell''s Roses Apricots. Her mother''s disintegrating memory. An invitation to Iceland. Illness. These are Rebecca Solnit''s raw materials, but The Faraway Nearby goes beyond her own life, as she spirals out into the stories she heard and read—from fairy tales to Mary Shelley''s Frankenstein—that helped her navigate her difficult passge. Solnit takes us into the lives of others—an arctic cannibal, the young Che Guevara among the leprosy afflicted, a blues musician, an Icelandic artist and her labyrinth—to understand warmth and coldness, kindness and imagination, decay and transformation, making art and making self. This captivating, exquisitely written exploration of the forces that connect us and the way we tell our stories is a tour de force of association, a marvelous Russian doll of a book that is a fitting companion to Solnit''s much-loved A Field Guide to Getting Lost.

The National Book Critics Circle Award–winning author delivers a collection of essays that serve as the perfect “antidote to mansplaining” (The Stranger). In her comic, scathing essay “Men Explain Things to Me,” Rebecca Solnit took on what often goes wrong in conversations between men and women. She wrote 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. She ends on a serious note— because the ultimate problem is the silencing of women who have something to say, including those saying things like, “He’s trying to kill me!” This book features that now-classic essay with six perfect complements, including an examination of the great feminist writer Virginia Woolf’s embrace of mystery, of not knowing, of doubt and ambiguity, a highly original inquiry into marriage equality, and a terrifying survey of the scope of contemporary violence against women. “In this series of personal but unsentimental essays, Solnit gives succinct shorthand to a familiar female experience that before had gone unarticulated, perhaps even unrecognized.” —The New York Times “Essential feminist reading.” —The New Republic “This slim book hums with power and wit.” —Boston Globe “Solnit tackles big themes of gender and power in these accessible essays. Honest and full of wit, this is an integral read that furthers the conversation on feminism and contemporary society.” —San Francisco Chronicle “Essential.” —Marketplace “Feminist, frequently funny, unflinchingly honest and often scathing in its conclusions.” —Salon

Presents twenty-two color maps and accompanying essays providing details on the people, ecology, and culture of the city.

What makes a place? Rebecca Solnit reinvents the traditional atlas, searching for layers of meaning & connections of experience across San Francisco.

The author of Men Explain Things to Me explores the moments of altruism and generosity that arise in the aftermath of disaster Why is it that in the aftermath of a disaster? whether manmade or natural?people suddenly become altruistic, resourceful, and brave? What makes the newfound communities and purpose many find in the ruins and crises after disaster so joyous? And what does this joy reveal about ordinarily unmet social desires and possibilities? In A Paradise Built in Hell, award-winning author Rebecca Solnit explores these phenomena, looking at major calamities from the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco through the 1917 explosion that tore up Halifax, Nova Scotia, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. She examines how disaster throws people into a temporary utopia of changed states of mind and social possibilities, as well as looking at the cost of the widespread myths and rarer real cases of social deterioration during crisis. This is a timely and important book from an acclaimed author whose work consistently locates unseen patterns and meanings in broad cultural histories.

Inspired by medieval bestiaries, a creative survey of the author and illustrator''s magical beasts imagines the characteristics and illusory properties of various fantastical native California creatures, from the bluebelly lizard and the California condor to the elephant seal and the tule elk, in a volume created in partnership with the Oakland Zoo.

Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes is Trevor Paglen''s longawaited first photographic monograph. Social scientist, artist, writer, and provocateur, Paglen has been exploring the secret activities of the U.S. military and intelligence agencies--the "black world"--for the last eight years, publishing, speaking, and making astonishing photographs. As an artist, Paglen is interested in the idea of photography as truth-telling, but his mysterious, compelling pictures o!en stop short of traditional ideas of documentation. Invisible highlights the array of tactics used by Paglen to depict both what can and cannot be seen. In the series Limit Telephotography, he employs highend optical systems to photograph top-secret governmental sites. In The Other Night Sky, Paglen works with the data of amateur "satellite watchers" to track and photograph classified spacecra! in Earth''s orbit, while in other works he roots out revealing, yet arcane documents--passports, flight data, aliases of CIA operatives--and transforms them into art objects. Showcasing the artwork of an important emerging talent, Invisible speaks to the multidisciplinary practices employed by many of today''s most interesting contemporary artists. Rebecca Solnit, noted author on culture and photography, contributes a searing essay that traces this history of clandestine military activity on the American landscape.

A collection of short essays celebrating and reclaiming the story of WTO resistance. Media distortions and activist myths are investigated and refuted by award-winning authors Rebecca and David Solnit. Before the tear gas settled, the real battle had begun: over whose version of history would triumph. These pithy insights into media spin and truth provide a timely re-assessment of the ongoing image of the Seattle protests and question the brazen lies that continue to appear in the mainstream press.

Amy Trachtenberg''s Groundwork is an intervention that makes the pivotal agricultural history of East San Jose, California more visible to residents and to visitors, and creates a chance for remembrance and reinterpretation that can help sustain a locally-grounded identity.

Essay by Rebecca Solnit. Afterword by William Jenkins.

This anthology of Solnits essential essays from the past ten years takes the reader from the Pyrenees to the U.S.-Mexican border, from open sky to the deepest mines and offers a panoramic world view enriched by the authors characteristically provocative, inspiring, and hopeful observations.

“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 in Rebecca Solnit''s life to explore issues of uncertainty, trust, loss, memory, desire, and place. Solnit is interested in the stories we use to navigate our way through the world, and the places we traverse, from wilderness to cities, in finding ourselves, or losing ourselves. While deeply personal, her own stories link up to larger stories, from captivity narratives of early Americans to the use of the color blue in Renaissance painting, not to mention encounters with tortoises, monks, punk rockers, mountains, deserts, and the movie Vertigo. The result is a distinctive, stimulating voyage of discovery.

Compares photographs taken just after the fires of the 1906 earthquake with new photos of modern San Francisco from the same vantage points, in a photo essay created in conjunction with the exhibition at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, California. Simultaneous.

This book blends personal observations on Yosemite with reflections on photography and aesthetics, tourism and public life, and the histories of environmental and social politics. Rebecca Solnit''s linked essays are interwoven with stunning images old and new: the book combines classic pictures by Eadweard Muybridge, Ansel Adams, and Edward Weston with painstakingly re-photographed versions to show the startling changes wrought over time -- by nature and humankind. Yosemite in Time paints a multifaceted portrait of a natural treasure that reflects the most compelling issues of our time.

A New York Times Notable Book Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, The Mark Lynton History Prize, and the Sally Hacker Prize for the History of Technology “A panoramic vision of cultural change” —The New York Times Through the story of the pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge, the author of Orwell''s Roses explores what it was about California in the late 19th-century that enabled it to become such a center of technological and cultural innovation The world as we know it today began in California in the late 1800s, and Eadweard Muybridge had a lot to do with it. This striking assertion is at the heart of Rebecca Solnit’s new book, which weaves together biography, history, and fascinating insights into art and technology to create a boldly original portrait of America on the threshold of modernity. The story of Muybridge—who in 1872 succeeded in capturing high-speed motion photographically—becomes a lens for a larger story about the acceleration and industrialization of everyday life. Solnit shows how the peculiar freedoms and opportunities of post–Civil War California led directly to the two industries—Hollywood and Silicon Valley—that have most powerfully defined contemporary society.

Reporting from the frontlines of gentrification in San Francisco''s Mission District, the author deplores the skyrocketing rents and corporate buy-outs that may be coming soon to a neighbourhood near you.

Cette étude divertissante considère la marche comme un art, avec ses maîtres, ses lieux de culte et son histoire. Rebecca Solnit évoque les différentes écoles de cet art qui célèbrent la beauté des paysages et du grand air. Par ailleurs, elle étudie les pèlerinages, les marches de protestation, les flâneries urbaines, le nomadisme des comédiens et des musiciens, les voyages à pied des compagnons du devoir et différentes pérégrinations qui, parfois, constituent de véritables rites de passage pour les jeunes. Le rythme de la marche a été ressenti par des philosophes et des écrivains comme propice à la réflexion, voire à la création. S''appuyant sur des citations et des anecdotes, Rebecca Solnit montre à quel point on saisit le monde à travers le corps et le corps à travers le monde. Mais ce " livre parcours " comprend aussi un véritable réquisitoire contre tout ce qui, aujourd''hui, empêche l''exercice de la marche. La rue est un espace démocratique par excellence, et la libre circulation du promeneur en ville et à la campagne une revendication plus nécessaire que jamais... A notre époque, l''art de la marche devient une pratique fondamentale et subversive dans les pays occidentaux.

A multidisciplinary compilation of nineteen incisive essays ranges from the formality of traditional art criticism to intimate, lyrical meditations as they explore nuclear test sites, the meaning of national borders and geographical features, and the idea of the feminine and the sublime.

"A beautiful, absorbing, tragic book. . . . Rebecca Solnit tells this story with the passion and clarity it deserves."—Larry McMurtry "Savage Dreams summons us to the campfires of resistance."—Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz "Savage Dreams is about many things: despoliation and restoration, finding a voice between contemporary noise and silence, making friends and enemies. Most of all, though, it may be about a journey into history: about how understanding history and making it are not really very different."—Greil Marcus, author of Lipstick Traces "A wonderful and important book, weaving past and present, politics and spirituality, land and history, pleasure and outrage, esthetics and activism, into a map where we as Americans find ourselves today. Intellectually challenging but beautifully written and eminently readable, Savage Dreams has both heart and teeth." —Lucy Lippard, author of Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory