An electric portrait of the artist as a young woman that asks how a writer finds her voice in a society that prefers women to be silent In Recollections of My Nonexistence, Rebecca Solnit describes her formation as a writer and as a feminist in 1980s San Francisco, in an atmosphere of gender violence on the street and throughout society and the exclusion of women from cultural arenas. She tells of being poor, hopeful, and adrift in the city that became her great teacher, and of the small apartment that, when she was nineteen, became the home in which she transformed herself. She explores the forces that liberated her as a person and as a writer--books themselves; the gay community that presented a new model of what else gender, family, and joy could mean; and her eventual arrival in the spacious landscapes and overlooked conflicts of the American West. Beyond being a memoir, Solnit's book is also a passionate argument: that women are not just impacted by personal experience, but by membership in a society where violence against women pervades. Looking back, she describes how she came to recognize that her own experiences of harassment and menace were inseparable from the systemic problem of who has a voice, or rather who is heard and respected and who is silenced--and how she was galvanized to use her own voice for change.
Recollections of My Non-Existence is the landmark memoir from a voice of a generation, and a rally cry for generations to come.
In 2011, when Dominique Strauss-Kahn, then the head of the International Monetary Fund, allegedly—a word I must use because the prosecutor dropped the criminal case, as he often did when it came to powerful men—sexually assaulted a New ...
As Christopher Dickey wrote in the Daily Beast, Strauss-Kahn “claims that his less-than-seven-minute sexual encounter with this woman he'd never met before was consensual. To be- lieve him, you'd have to buy the line that Diallo took ...
A passionate, thought provoking exploration of walking as a political and cultural activity, from the author of the memoir Recollections of My Nonexistence Drawing together many histories--of anatomical evolution and city design, of ...
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction Finalist for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography “An exhilarating romp through Orwell’s life and times and also through the life and times of roses.” ...
September: Muybridge photographs at Point Bonita on the north side of the Golden Gate, including views of the stranded ship Costa Rica, which went aground at Point Diablo here in September 1873. He seems to have photographed San Quentin ...
From the author of Orwell's Roses, a personal, lyrical narrative about storytelling and empathy—a fitting companion to Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award In this exquisitely ...
"This book is a true love letter, not only to Jha's own son but also to all of our sons and to the parents--especially mothers--who raise them.” —Ijeoma Oluo, author of So You Want to Talk About Race and Mediocre Beautifully written and ...
The Abalone Alliance, whose name was inspired by new england's antinuclear Clamshell Alliance, began protesting Diablo Canyon Power Plant on the central California coast. At the August 7, 1977, demonstration against the poorly designed ...
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.