Reading List

Authors Like Rebecca Solnit

At a party in Aspen, a wealthy man asked Rebecca Solnit what she wrote about, cut her off when she began on her book about the photographer Eadweard Muybridge, and told her about a “very important Muybridge book” that had just come out. It was hers; her friend had to say so several times before he took it in, and he admitted he had only read a review. The essay she made of that evening became the title piece of Men Explain Things to Me (2014) and is usually credited with the word “mansplaining”, though Solnit never used it. The Muybridge book, River of Shadows, had won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism in 2004. Born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1961 and raised in Marin County, California, she has written on walking, getting lost, how people behave after disasters, her own young womanhood in San Francisco and George Orwell's roses; The Beginning Comes After the End (2026) returns to the argument of Hope in the Dark. Readers come to her for the way one essay can move from a personal scene to history to politics without losing its thread. The writers below share that: an essayist's freedom of movement, close attention to place, and the conviction that private observation can carry a public argument.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Essays & cultural criticism · Walking and place · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love Rebecca Solnit, start with Susan Sontag, whose On Photography sits behind Solnit's own book on Muybridge. For the Californian essay, read Joan Didion; for walking and landscape, Robert Macfarlane; for the wandering, associative essay written now, Olivia Laing and Maggie Nelson. And for the feminist argument made plain, bell hooks.

10 authors like Rebecca Solnit

01
The essay as serious thought

Susan Sontag

American · b. 1933 · Essayist and novelist · National Book Award 2000

Sontag made the long essay a public event in American culture, from “Notes on ‘Camp’” (1964) to On Photography (1977), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Illness as Metaphor (1978). Her novel In America won the National Book Award in 2000. Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) returned to photographs of war and suffering.

The obvious elder for Solnit's criticism: River of Shadows is a book about what photography did to time and space, and it stands in the line On Photography began. Sontag is more austere and impersonal, and rarely lets her own life into the argument; Solnit almost always does. Read them together to see two ways of thinking hard in public.

— Lisanne

Every book by Susan Sontag →

02
California, cooler

Joan Didion

American · b. 1934 · Essayist · National Book Award 2005

Didion's essays on California and the late 1960s in Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album set the standard for the personal essay as reportage. Where I Was From (2003) takes apart the myths of her own state. The Year of Magical Thinking, about the year after her husband's death, won the National Book Award in 2005.

Both are Californian essayists who use a closely observed scene to say something about the country, and both have written about the West's stories of itself. The difference is temperature: Didion is cool, sceptical and withholding; Solnit is warmer and openly committed, and ends on hope where Didion ends on dread.

— Lisanne

Every book by Joan Didion →

03
The essayist Solnit returns to

Virginia Woolf

English · b. 1882 · Novelist and essayist

Woolf rebuilt the English novel around consciousness in Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), and in A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas wrote the founding essays of modern feminist criticism. Her essay “Street Haunting” (1927) is a walk across London in search of a pencil.

Woolf runs through Solnit's work: “Woolf's Darkness”, an essay in Men Explain Things to Me, takes its title from Woolf's 1915 diary line that the future is dark, “which is the best thing the future can be”. Woolf's essays move the way Solnit's do — digressive, funny, and arriving at the argument by walking round it.

— Lisanne

Every book by Virginia Woolf →

04
Attention as a discipline

Annie Dillard

American · b. 1945 · Essayist · Pulitzer 1975

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Dillard's account of a year of watching a creek in Virginia's Blue Ridge, won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 1975. Teaching a Stone to Talk collects her shorter essays, including “Total Eclipse”, and The Writing Life (1989) is her short book on the work itself.

The writer to read for the patience behind Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost: a long, steady look at one place until it opens onto questions of time and death. Dillard is more religious and more inward, and has almost no interest in politics; what they share is a sentence that notices first and generalises second.

— Lisanne

Every book by Annie Dillard →

05
Feminism in plain words

bell hooks

American · b. 1952 · Writer and cultural critic

Born Gloria Jean Watkins in Kentucky, hooks wrote more than thirty books on race, gender and class, from Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981) to Feminism Is for Everybody and All About Love (both 2000). She chose to write her pen name in lower case to put the attention on the ideas rather than the author.

If Men Explain Things to Me was your way into feminist argument, hooks is the next step: the same refusal of academic jargon and the same belief that ordinary experience is evidence. She is more direct and less digressive than Solnit, and puts race at the centre of the argument where Solnit more often starts from gender.

— Lisanne

Every book by bell hooks →

06
The closest living match

Olivia Laing

British · b. 1977 · Essayist and novelist

Laing's first book, To the River, follows the Ouse on foot to the place where Virginia Woolf drowned in 1941. The Lonely City mixes her own isolation in New York with the lives of artists including Edward Hopper and Andy Warhol, and The Garden Against Time (2024) is about restoring a walled garden in Suffolk. Her novel Crudo won the James Tait Black Prize in 2019.

The nearest thing to Solnit's method in British writing: a walk, a garden or a lonely winter becomes the way into art history and politics. The Garden Against Time makes a natural pair with Orwell's Roses, two books that ask what a garden has to do with power and labour. Laing is more confessional and more drawn to artists' lives.

— Lisanne

Every book by Olivia Laing →

07
Walking, in Britain

Robert Macfarlane

British · b. 1976 · Nature writer

Macfarlane is a Cambridge academic whose books follow landscape on foot: Mountains of the Mind (2003), The Wild Places (2007), The Old Ways (2012), about ancient paths and the people who walked them, and Underland (2019), which won the Wainwright Prize. Is a River Alive? (2025) asks whether rivers should have legal rights.

Read him after Wanderlust: The Old Ways is the book that takes walking as a way of thinking further than anyone since. He is more lyrical and more interested in words for landscape than in politics, though Is a River Alive? moves him closer to Solnit's activism.

— Lisanne

Every book by Robert Macfarlane →

08
The fragment, from Marin County

Maggie Nelson

American · b. 1973 · Essayist and poet · National Book Critics Circle Award 2015

Nelson grew up in Marin County, California, and writes book-length essays built from numbered fragments: Bluets (2009) on the colour blue and heartbreak, The Argonauts (2015) on queer family and motherhood, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and On Freedom (2021). She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2016.

The writer who most resembles Solnit's The Faraway Nearby: theory, autobiography and other people's books braided into one argument. Nelson is more theoretical and more interested in contradiction; Solnit is clearer about where she stands. On Freedom and Hope in the Dark make a good argument with each other.

— Lisanne

Every book by Maggie Nelson →

09
The American West, personally

Terry Tempest Williams

American · b. 1955 · Naturalist and essayist

Williams is a Utah writer and naturalist. Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (1991) sets her mother's cancer beside the flooding of the Bear River bird refuge, and its epilogue, “The Clan of One-Breasted Women”, asks whether the cancers in her family came from the fallout of 1950s nuclear testing. Between 1987 and 1992 she took part in civil disobedience against testing in the Nevada desert.

The writer who stands closest to Solnit's early books on the West: Solnit's Savage Dreams (1994) is also about the Nevada Test Site and the land around it. Williams is more spiritual and more rooted in one place and one family, but both turn landscape into an argument about who pays for history.

— Lisanne
10
The subject of Orwell's Roses

George Orwell

English · b. 1903 · Novelist and essayist

Born Eric Blair in India, Orwell wrote reportage on poverty and on the Spanish Civil War in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) and Homage to Catalonia (1938), and the essays “Why I Write” and “Politics and the English Language” (both 1946) before Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

Solnit wrote a whole book about him: Orwell's Roses (2021) begins with the roses he planted at his cottage in Wallington, Hertfordshire, in 1936. Go to the essays rather than the novels: the same insistence that clear language is a political act, and the same habit of starting from something small and concrete.

— Lisanne

Every book by George Orwell →

Where to start if you loved Rebecca Solnit

If you want Men Explain Things to Me again, read bell hooks.

Feminism Is for Everybody: the argument, short and plain.

If you want Wanderlust's walking, read Robert Macfarlane.

The Old Ways: paths, and the thinking done on them.

If you want the essay that wanders, read Olivia Laing.

The Lonely City, then The Garden Against Time beside Orwell's Roses.

If you want the criticism, read Susan Sontag.

On Photography, the book behind River of Shadows.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Rebecca Solnit

Who should I read if I love Rebecca Solnit?

Susan Sontag and Joan Didion are the essayists she most often gets compared to: Sontag for criticism, Didion for California. Among living writers, Olivia Laing and Maggie Nelson write the same wandering, personal-and-political essay, Robert Macfarlane writes about walking and landscape, and bell hooks makes the feminist argument in equally plain words.

What books are like Men Explain Things to Me?

bell hooks's Feminism Is for Everybody (2000) and Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929) are the closest: short, clear feminist arguments built from everyday experience. Woolf also matters because Solnit's essay “Woolf's Darkness” is in the same collection.

What books are like Wanderlust?

Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways (2012) is the closest, a book about walking old paths and what walking does to thought. Olivia Laing's To the River (2011) follows one river on foot, and Virginia Woolf's essay “Street Haunting” (1927) is a walk across London.

Did Rebecca Solnit coin the word mansplaining?

No. Her essay “Men Explain Things to Me”, the title piece of her 2014 collection, is usually credited with inspiring the word, but she did not use it in the essay. The essay describes a man at a party in Aspen explaining her own book on Eadweard Muybridge to her.

What is Rebecca Solnit's newest book?

The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change, published by Haymarket Books in 2026. It is a sequel to Hope in the Dark and looks at how much has changed socially, politically and culturally since 1960.

Where should I start with Rebecca Solnit?

Men Explain Things to Me (2014) is short and the most read. A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005) shows her personal essay at its best, and Wanderlust is the book on walking. For her criticism, River of Shadows won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2004.

Footnotes

  1. Rebecca Solnit — Wikipedia
  2. Rebecca Solnit's Men Explain Things to Me — The New Republic
  3. Orwell's Roses review — NPR
  4. Solnit draws from Woolf again and again — Blogging Woolf
  5. Refuge — Terry Tempest Williams
  6. Olivia Laing — Wikipedia
  7. Maggie Nelson — Wikipedia
  8. Robert Macfarlane — Wikipedia

List last reviewed 15 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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