Rebecca Solnit Audiobooks

The Beginning Comes After the End, essays from a defining voice in American non-fiction

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Who is Rebecca Solnit?

Rebecca Solnit, born in 1961, is an American writer and activist whose range puts most essayists to shame: feminism, the environment, politics, place and art all fall within her territory, and she moves between them without ever sounding like a tourist. She is the author of seventeen books, a body of work that has made her one of the defining voices of contemporary American non-fiction.

The milestones are worth naming. River of Shadows won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism in 2004. A Paradise Built in Hell, first published in 2009 and revised in 2020, charted the altruistic ways communities respond to disaster. The Faraway Nearby, from 2013, is a wide-ranging memoir, while Men Explain Things to Me, her 2014 collection of essays on feminism and women’s writing, is probably the title most readers arrive through.

Rebecca Solnit in audiobooks

Essayists are a gamble in audio; Solnit is one of the safer bets, because her writing is built on voice in the first place – the sense of a mind thinking aloud, connecting politics to place to the question of who gets heard. Our catalogue features The Beginning Comes After the End, and the title is pure Solnit: the conviction, visible too in her study of communities rebuilding after disaster, that what follows catastrophe deserves serious attention.

For UK listeners, she offers American essay-writing at full stretch – political without hectoring, personal without being confessional. Heard rather than read, the essays feel like the best kind of conversation.