When I started, the essay was belles-lettres, decorative. Essays by women, particularly, tended to be treated as memoir even when they were not. Now they’re seen as powerful and compelling again. We’re in a golden age.
Rebecca Solnit: ‘The essay is powerful again. We’re in a golden age’ (Guardian)
To celebrate the arrival of her latest essay collection, The Mother of All Questions, we've made Rebecca Solnit our Author of the Month for September! Check out a few highlights below, and swing by soon for more of her titles (plus a chance to browse our newly curated Essays section.)
The Mother of All Questions: Further Feminisms
From Granta:
Following on from the success of Men Explain Things to Me comes a new collection of essays in which Rebecca Solnit opens up a feminism for all of us: one that doesn't stigmatize women's lives, whether they include spouses and children or not; that brings empathy to the silences in men's lives as well as the silencing of women's lives; celebrates the ways feminism has shifted in recent years to reclaim rape jokes, revise canons, and rethink our everyday lives.
A Field Guide to Getting Lost
From Canongate:
In this investigation into loss, losing and being lost, Rebecca Solnit explores the challenges of living with uncertainty. A Field Guide to Getting Lost takes in subjects as eclectic as memory and mapmaking, Hitchcock movies and Renaissance painting,
Beautifully written, this book combines memoir, history and philosophy, shedding glittering new light on the way we live now.
Men Explain Things to Me
From Granta:
Rebecca Solnit's essay Men Explain Things to Me has become a touchstone of the feminist movement, inspired the term 'mansplaining', and established Solnit as one of the leading feminist thinkers of our time - one who has inspired everyone from radical activists to Beyoncé Knowles. Collected here in print for the first time is the essay itself, along with the best of Solnit's feminist writings.
From rape culture to mansplaining, from French sex scandals to marriage and the nuclear family, from Virginia Woolf to colonialism, these essays are a fierce and incisive exploration of the issues that a patriarchal culture will not necessarily acknowledge as 'issues' at all. With grace and energy, and in the most exquisite and inviting of prose, Rebecca Solnit proves herself a vital leading figure of the feminist movement and a radical, humane thinker.
