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National Book Award Longlist
Winner of the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction
Winner of the Foreword INDIE Editor’s Choice Prize for Nonfiction
“Rebecca Solnit is essential feminist reading.” —The New Republic
“Solnit’s exquisite essays move between the political and the personal, the intellectual and the earthy.” —Elle
Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books, including the international bestseller Men Explain Things to Me. Called “the voice of the resistance” by the New York Times, she has emerged as an essential guide to our times, through her incisive commentary on feminism, violence, ecology, hope, and everything in between.
In this powerful and wide-ranging collection, Solnit turns her attention to battles over meaning, place, language, and belonging at the heart of the defining crises of our time. She explores the way emotions shape political life, electoral politics, police shootings and gentrification, the life of an extraordinary man on death row, the pipeline protest at Standing Rock, and the existential threat posed by climate change.
The work of changing the world sometimes requires changing the story, the names, and inventing or popularizing new names and terms and phrases. Calling things by their true names can also cut through the lies that excuse, disguise, avoid, or encourage inaction, indifference, obliviousness in the face of injustice and violence.
“A searing and super smart call-to-arms that takes on a range of social and political problems in America—from racism and misogyny to climate change and Donald Trump—Call Them by Their True Names features Solnit’s signature wit, humor, honesty, and incisive commentary, and beneath it all, a focus on progress and hope.”
—Poets & Writers
“Solnit [is] a powerful cultural critic: as always, she opts for measured assessment and pragmatism over hype and hysteria.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Solnit is careful with her words (she always is) but never so much that she mutes the infuriated spirit that drives these essays.”
—Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
“Rebecca Solnit is a treasure.”
—Marketplace
“Solnit’s exquisite essays move between the political and the personal, the intellectual and the earthy.”
—ELLE
“Rebecca Solnit is the voice of the resistance.”
—New York Times Magazine
“No writer has better understood the mix of fear and possibility, peril and exuberance that's marked this new millennium.”
—Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org
“Rebecca Solnit is essential feminist reading.”
—The New Republic
Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of twenty books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster, including a trilogy of atlases and the books The Mother of All Questions, Hope in the Dark, Men Explain Things to Me; The Faraway Nearby; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; A Field Guide to Getting Lost; Wanderlust: A History of Walking; and River of Shadows, Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award). A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a columnist at Harper’s.
- Armpit Wax
American Emotions
Ideology of Isolation
Naïve Cynicism
In Praise of Preaching to the Choir
Facing the Furies
American Edges
Death by Gentrification
Bird in a Cage
coda: Injustice
Delayed
Katrina Ten Years Later
The Light from Standing Rock
Monument Wars
Monument to the Unknown DV Victim
Homelessness essay
City of Women
Abolish High School
Electoral Obscenities
Tyranny of the Minority
The Loneliness of Donald Trump
Milestones in Misogyny
Every Election Is a Disaster Movie
Nevertheless, Hope
On Indirect Effects (Guardian, March 2017)