Men Explain Things to Me

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.

What has always impressed me in Solnit's writing is the simple cadence and timbre of a sentence, a paragraph, the way a whole essay lilts and skips. She is not one of the most important female essayists of her generation. She is one of the most important essayists of her generation. Incendiary, indignant, and true, [A] trenchant collection of essays... an eloquent reminder that we still have some way to go when it comes to speaking of the issues Solnit raises, Stark and powerful prose... Solnit is a compelling writer with a glorious turn of phrase, [These essays] are the thin edge of a continuum that reaches from the opening anecdote to the rape and murder statistics that she deploys to such devastating effect. Solnit's book does what the best feminist writing does: it makes me angry. And it makes me believe we can, and we must, fight for change, Exceptional... The feminist debate has once again exploded into the mainstream over the last few years, and this collection marks Solnit out as among the most thoughtful of many energetic writers leading it

Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books, including Orwell's Roses, Recollections of My Non-Existence, The Faraway Nearby, Wanderlust, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, River of Shadows and A Paradise Built in Hell. She is also the author of many essays on feminism, activism, social change, hope, and the climate crisis. A contributing editor to Harper's, she writes regularly for the Guardian, the London Review of Books and the Los Angeles Times. She lives in San Francisco.