The Faraway Nearby

From the author of Men Explain Things to Me, a personal, lyrical narrative about storytelling and empathy – a fitting companion to Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost
 
A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award

In this exquisitely written book by the author of A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit explores the ways we make our lives out of stories, and how we are connected by empathy, by narrative, by imagination. In the course of unpacking some of her own stories—of her mother and her decline from memory loss, of a trip to Iceland, of an illness—Solnit revisits fairytales and entertains other stories: about arctic explorers, Che Guevara among the leper colonies, and Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, about warmth and coldness, pain and kindness, decay and transformation, making art and making self. Woven together, these stories create a map which charts the boundaries and territories of storytelling, reframing who each of us is and how we might tell our story.

• A Field Guide to Getting Lost
• Wanderlust: A History of Walking
• Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities
• Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays)
• The Mother of All Questions: Further Reports from the Feminist Revolutions
• Men Explain Things to Me
• A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster
• River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West
• The Argonauts
• Crazy Brave: A Memoir