Praise for The Faraway Nearby

“The Faraway Nearby is a masterpiece, about nothing less than the story (the myth, the fairy tale) we are living, about how we can step out of that story to become who we are, who we are meant to be. ‘The self is also a creation, the principal work of your life, the crafting of which makes everyone an artist,’ says Solnit, and she is one of the few writers alive able to be our guide in this ‘unfinished work of becoming.’   This book is a gift—it will make your life larger.” —Nick Flynn, author of The Reenactments

“Scheherazade nested one tale inside another in order to save her life; Rebecca Solnit dovetails her own intricate stories to trace the seemingly disparate but profoundly connected elements of a life:  a hundred pounds of apricots, a mother vanishing into a haze of forgetting, the allure of ice, the way we locate ourselves in the world through telling stories, finding a voice for the silent self who becomes real as she or he is spoken. When you sit down to a new book by Solnit, you know that you'll come up from it changed:  the world seems both more clear and more mysterious at once. Here's one of the most trustworthy voices we have; Rebecca Solnit makes, in book after marvelous book, a new map of the world.” —Mark Doty, author of Fire to Fire:  New and Selected Poems