Rebecca Solnit Books In Order

Publication Order of City Atlases Books

Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Rebecca Solnit
Rebecca Solnit was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut in the year 1961 to an Irish Catholic mom and a Jewish dad and in the year 1966 her family moved Novato, California, where she grew up.

Rebecca was a battered kid. She grew up in an incredibly violent house where everything that was female and feminine and her gender was hated.

Rebecca’s a product of the California public education system from the time she began attending kindergarten until graduate school, she’s a columnist at the Guardian and is a regular contributor to Literary Hub. Rebecca’s also contributed to Harper’s Magazine, where she’s the first woman to write regularly the Easy Chair column in the year 1851, and she contributes to the political blog TomDispatch.

Rebecca skipped high school entirely, enrolling in an alternative junior high school in the public school system that took her through tenth grade, when she passed General Educational Development tests. After that, she enrolled in junior college.

At the age of seventeen, she went to study in Paris, and returned to study in California to finish up her college education at San Francisco State University. Then she got her master’s degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley in 1984, and she has been an independent writer since the year 1988.

Solnit’s worked on human rights and environmental campaigns since the eighties, notably with the Western Shoshone Defense Project during the early nineties, as described in “Savage Dreams”, one of her books, and with antiwar activists all throughout the Bush era. She’s discussed her interest in climate change as well as the work of the Sierra Club and 350.org, and in women’s rights, particularly violence against women.

She’s also written on all kinds of other subjects, which include: art, the environment, feminism, politics, and place.

Solnit credits writers such as: Pablo Neruda, Henry David Thoreau, Eduardo Galeano, Elena Poniatowska, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Virginia Woolf, and Ariel Dorfman that have influenced her work.

“Call Them By Their True Names” won the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction in 2018. For “River of Shadows” she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lannan Literary Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. “The Faraway Nearby” was shortlisted for a National Book Critics Circle Award and nominated for a National Book Award. Utne Reader magazine named her as one of the “25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World”. For her writing on the effects of technology on humanities and the arts, she was given a Wired Rave Award in 2004.

“Cinderella Liberator” is a story that was released in the year 2019. Cinderella, who’d rather only be Ella, meets her fairy godmother, heads to the ball, and makes friends with a prince, called Prince Nevermind. That is where the familiar tale concludes. Cinderella, instead of just waiting around to get rescued, learns that she’s able to save herself and those all around her by being true to her own self and standing up for the things she believes in.

This story is an update to a classic fairy tale with a feminist and fresh Cinderella and some new plot twists sure to inspire young readers to change the world, featuring gorgeous silhouettes from Arthur Rackham on every page.

“Men Explain Things to Me” is a non-fiction book that was released in the year 2014. In Rebecca’s scathing, funny essay “Men Explain Things to Me”, she takes on what usually goes wrong in conversations between women and men. She wrote on men that wrongly assume they know things and wrongly assume that women don’t, about the reasons why this arises, and how this aspect of gender wars works. She also airs some of her own hilariously horrible encounters.

Rebecca ends on a serious note, because the ultimate problem that comes with the silencing of women that have something to say, including those women saying things such as “He is trying to kill me!”

This book features that classic essay with six perfect complements, including an examination of the writer Virginia Woolf’s embrace of mystery, of not knowing, of ambiguity and doubt, a hugely original inquiry into marriage equality, and a horrifying survey of the scope of contemporary violence against females.

Solnit’s been credited with the paving the way for coining of the term “mansplaining”, a word that’s used to refer to instances where men explain things, typically toward women, in a patronizing and/or condescending way. However, she does not actually use the term in the original essay.

In her memoir, titled “Recollections of My Nonexistence” (which was released in 2020), she describes her formation as a feminist and a writer in eighties San Francisco, in an atmosphere of gender violence on the street and throughout society and the exclusion of women from different cultural arenas. She talks about being hopeful, adrift, and poor in the city that would become her great teacher. As well as about that tiny apartment that, when she was only nineteen, became the home she transformed herself, and about how punk rock gave voice and form to her own explosive energy and fury.

Rebecca recounts just how she came to recognize the epidemic of violence going on all around her, the trauma that altered her, the street harassment that unsettled her, and each of the authority figures that routinely would disbelieved and disdained girls. Including her. Looking back in time, she sees all of these as consequences of the voicelessness that was and still is the ordinary conditions of all women, and how she contended with this as she became a writer and a public voice for women’s rights.

She explores all of the forces that liberated her as a person and a writer, books themselves, the gay guys all around her that offered up other visions of what family, gender, and joy could be. And her later arrival in the spacious landscapes and overlooked conflicts in the American West. These influences all taught her how to write the same way that she has been since, and gave to her a voice that’s resonated with and empowered so many others.