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At a party in Aspen, a man told Rebecca Solnit about a very important book on the photographer Eadweard Muybridge that had just come out. It was her own book, River of Shadows, and he had not read it, only a review. She wrote up the evening in “Men Explain Things to Me” (2008), the essay that later gave its name to her best-known book. The Muybridge book itself had won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and around them sit books on walking, disaster, getting lost, her mother’s apricots and George Orwell’s roses. Born in 1961 and a writer in San Francisco since the late 1980s, she has published more than twenty books. This guide covers her 14 key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 14 key books · 1994–2026 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Rebecca Solnit has published around thirty books, counting atlases, collaborations and edited volumes. The best known are Men Explain Things to Me (2014), River of Shadows (2003), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, Hope in the Dark (2004), A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005) and Orwell’s Roses (2021). Start with River of Shadows; the list below shows where each of the others fits.
Where to Start with Rebecca Solnit
If you want her most acclaimed book
→ River of Shadows (2003) — Muybridge, railroads and the speeding-up of America.
If you want her most influential book
→ Men Explain Things to Me (2014) — the essay collection behind a new word.
If you want something short and personal
→ A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005) — essays on uncertainty and not knowing.
If you want her argument for hope
→ Hope in the Dark (2004) — written in the first weeks of the Iraq war.
14 Rebecca Solnit Books, in Order
Savage Dreams
Two contested landscapes side by side: the Nevada Test Site, where the United States exploded nuclear bombs on land claimed by the Western Shoshone, and Yosemite, a national park created by removing the people who lived there. Solnit draws on her own years as an anti-nuclear activist at the test site. The subtitle was A Journey into the Hidden Wars of the American West in the first edition.
Wanderlust
A history of walking as a way of thinking, worshipping, protesting and seeing a city, from Rousseau and Wordsworth to pilgrimages, mountaineering, women alone in the street and the protest march. It mixes the history with walks of her own, and set out themes she would return to for the rest of her career.
River of Shadows
A life of the photographer Eadweard Muybridge, whose 1878 pictures of a galloping horse froze motion for the first time, set against the California of the railroads, Leland Stanford and the early technology industry. Muybridge also killed his wife’s lover and was acquitted. The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism and the Sally Hacker Prize of the Society for the History of Technology.
Hope in the Dark
Written in 2003, weeks after the invasion of Iraq began, as an argument against despair: activism often wins later and in ways nobody predicted, so its victories go unnoticed. Solnit gathers examples from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the Zapatistas. She revised and expanded it for a new edition in 2016.
A Field Guide to Getting Lost
Linked essays on uncertainty, distance and not knowing, alternating personal chapters with chapters titled “The Blue of Distance”. She moves from her own losses and friendships to captivity narratives, early explorers and the painter Yves Klein. It is one of her shortest and most personal books.
A Paradise Built in Hell
Five disasters, from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the 1917 Halifax explosion to the Mexico City earthquake of 1985, 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, used to show that ordinary people mostly respond to catastrophe with improvised kindness and mutual aid. The panic, she argues, more often comes from those in power, a pattern she calls “elite panic”.
Infinite City
Twenty-two maps of San Francisco, each overlaying two unexpected things, such as butterfly habitats and queer public spaces, with essays by Solnit and others. It was the first of three city atlases, followed by New Orleans (2013) and New York (2016).
The Faraway Nearby
It starts with a hundred pounds of apricots from her mother’s tree, picked as her mother was sinking into Alzheimer’s disease, and spirals out to Frankenstein, Che Guevara, a stay in Iceland and her own illness. It is a book about how the stories we tell ourselves shape who we are. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Men Explain Things to Me
A short collection opening with the 2008 title essay about the man in Aspen who explained her own book to her, followed by essays on violence against women, marriage equality and Virginia Woolf. The essay is widely credited with inspiring the word “mansplaining”, though Solnit did not use the word herself. The book has been translated into many languages.
Call Them by Their True Names
Essays on the US in the years around the 2016 election, on police killings, gentrification, climate, misogyny and the language used to hide them; the title essay argues that naming things accurately is the first step to changing them. It won the 2018 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction.
Recollections of My Nonexistence
Her memoir of becoming a writer in San Francisco in the 1980s: a cheap flat she lived in for 25 years, punk, galleries, the anti-nuclear movement, and the constant threat of violence that shaped how a young woman could move through a city. It ends as she finds her subject and her voice.
Orwell’s Roses
In 1936 George Orwell planted roses at his cottage in Wallington, Hertfordshire; Solnit found some still blooming more than eighty years later. From there she writes about the Orwell who gardened and loved pleasure, and about coal, Stalin’s lemons, the Colombian cut-flower industry and the politics of beauty.
No Straight Road Takes You There
Essays on climate, feminism, democracy and abuses of power, written in the spirit of Hope in the Dark: change, she argues, comes indirectly, slowly and imperfectly, and the past shows what is still possible. Published by Haymarket Books.
The Beginning Comes After the End
A short book, published by Haymarket in March 2026, arguing that progress in civil rights, feminism, LGBTQ+ equality, Indigenous rights and the environment is real but easy to miss because we forget where we started. She reads the far-right backlash as the violent end of an old order rather than the future.
In What Order to Read Rebecca Solnit
No Solnit book depends on another, so read by subject. A few belong together: Hope in the Dark, No Straight Road Takes You There and The Beginning Comes After the End make one long argument about how change happens; A Field Guide to Getting Lost, The Faraway Nearby and Recollections of My Nonexistence are her three most personal books.
Publication order shows the range widening: the West, walking and photography first, then hope and disaster in the 2000s, then the feminist essays that made her widely known after 2014, and recently books about time, change and Orwell.
A reading path
1. Men Explain Things to Me (2014)
2. River of Shadows (2003)
3. A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005)
4. A Paradise Built in Hell (2009)
5. Orwell’s Roses (2021)
Everything Else Rebecca Solnit Published
Beyond the 14 key books: 17 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Essays, history and travel
8
8 books · 1991–2019
- 1991Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Eraher first book, on Beat-era artists
- 1997A Book of Migrations: Some Passages in Irelandtravels in Ireland, on migration and nomadism
- 2000Hollow CitySan Francisco and the dot-com boom
- 2001As Eve Said to the Serpentessays on landscape, gender and art
- 2007Storming the Gates of Paradiseessays on landscape and politics
- 2014The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousnesscollected essays
- 2017The Mother of All Questionsfeminist essays, a sequel to Men Explain Things to Me
- 2019Whose Story Is This?essays on who gets to tell the story
Atlases and collaborations
7
7 books · 2005–2023
- 2005Yosemite in Timewith the photographers Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe
- 2006After the Ruins, 1906 and 2006San Francisco earthquake rephotography, with Mark Klett and others
- 2010A California Bestiaryillustrated by Mona Caron
- 2013Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlaswith Rebecca Snedeker
- 2016Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlaswith Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
- 2018Drowned RiverGlen Canyon on the Colorado, with Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe
- 2023Not Too Lateclimate anthology, co-edited with Thelma Young Lutunatabua
For children
2
2 books · 2019–2022
- 2019Cinderella Liberatora retelling with Arthur Rackham’s silhouettes
- 2022Waking Beautya retelling of Sleeping Beauty
The years · 1961–2026
Quick facts about Rebecca Solnit
- Known for
- Rebecca Solnit is known for essays that link walking, landscape, disaster and feminism to questions of power and hope, and for the essay that inspired the word “mansplaining”.
- 1961
- Born in Bridgeport, Connecticut
- 1988
- Becomes an independent writer in San Francisco
- 2003
- River of Shadows
- Born
- 24 June 1961, Bridgeport, Connecticut; grew up in Novato, California, from 1966
- Education
- San Francisco State University; MA in journalism, UC Berkeley, 1984
- Lives
- San Francisco
- Columns
- First woman to write Harper’s “Easy Chair” column regularly; writes for The Guardian
- Honours
- National Book Critics Circle Award (2004), Kirkus Prize (2018), Windham–Campbell Prize (2019), Guggenheim Fellowship
- Activism
- Launched the climate project Not Too Late
The red mark is 2003: River of Shadows, her book on Eadweard Muybridge, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
How Rebecca Solnit Writes: Connecting Things
Solnit works by juxtaposition. A book usually starts from one concrete thing, a horse caught on camera, a pile of apricots, a rose bush in Hertfordshire, and moves outward through history, politics and her own life until the small thing explains the large one. Infinite City makes the method literal: each map lays two unrelated things over the same streets.
She writes as a historian and an activist at once. The research is real, with notes and archives behind River of Shadows and A Paradise Built in Hell, but the books argue a case: that ordinary people are better than the stories told about them, that hope is a discipline rather than a mood, that naming something accurately is a political act.
Her sentences are long and essayistic, often built from lists and digressions, and her short books are often collections of pieces first published in Harper’s, The Guardian, TomDispatch or Lit Hub. For writers who think in a similar way, from Joan Didion to Jenny Odell, see Authors like Rebecca Solnit.
Watch
Rebecca Solnit in conversation
Solnit talks with Paul Holdengräber at Occidental College in Los Angeles on 28 November 2023.
Frequently asked questions about Rebecca Solnit’s books
How many books has Rebecca Solnit written?
Around thirty, counting city atlases, photography collaborations, edited volumes and two children’s books; her own biographies say “more than twenty”. This page covers 14 key books, from Savage Dreams (1994) to The Beginning Comes After the End (2026), and lists the rest underneath.
What are Rebecca Solnit’s books in order?
The key books are Savage Dreams (1994), Wanderlust (2000), River of Shadows (2003), Hope in the Dark (2004), A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005), A Paradise Built in Hell (2009), Infinite City (2010), The Faraway Nearby (2013), Men Explain Things to Me (2014), Call Them by Their True Names (2018), Recollections of My Nonexistence (2020), Orwell’s Roses (2021), No Straight Road Takes You There (2025) and The Beginning Comes After the End (2026).
Where should I start with Rebecca Solnit?
With River of Shadows (2003), her most acclaimed book, if you like narrative history. If you want something short, start with Men Explain Things to Me (2014) or A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005).
What is Rebecca Solnit’s most famous book?
Men Explain Things to Me (2014), her most widely read book. Its title essay, first published in 2008, is often credited with inspiring the word “mansplaining”.
Did Rebecca Solnit coin the word mansplaining?
No. Her 2008 essay “Men Explain Things to Me” described the behaviour and inspired the word, which appeared online soon after, but Solnit did not use it in the essay and has said she did not coin it.
Which Rebecca Solnit books won awards?
River of Shadows won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism in 2004, as well as the Sally Hacker Prize, and Call Them by Their True Names won the 2018 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction. The Faraway Nearby was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. In 2019 she received a Windham–Campbell Prize for her nonfiction as a whole.
What is Rebecca Solnit’s memoir called?
Recollections of My Nonexistence (2020), about becoming a writer in 1980s San Francisco. The Faraway Nearby (2013) and A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005) are also largely autobiographical.
Does Rebecca Solnit write about topics other than feminism?
Yes, most of her books are about something else: walking in Wanderlust, photography and technology in River of Shadows, disaster in A Paradise Built in Hell, cities in her three atlases, George Orwell in Orwell’s Roses, and hope and political change in Hope in the Dark and her recent essays.
What is Rebecca Solnit’s newest book?
The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change, published by Haymarket in March 2026. Before it came No Straight Road Takes You There (2025).
Is Rebecca Solnit still alive?
Yes. She was born on 24 June 1961 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and lives in San Francisco.
Footnotes
- Rebecca Solnit — Wikipedia
- The Beginning Comes After the End — Publishers Weekly
- No Straight Road Takes You There — Ingram Academic
- Hope in the Dark — The Marginalian
- Oxy Live! A Conversation with Rebecca Solnit — Occidental College
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.”
— Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark (2016 edition)
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