No Straight Road Takes You There with Rebecca Solnit and Lauren Markham

Join acclaimed authors Rebecca Solnit and Lauren Markham in conversation on Solnit’s latest book, No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain. In the spirit of her bestselling book Hope in the Dark, Solnit explores how our actions can shape the future and the liberatory possibilities of embracing uncertainty. Beginning with an essay about a three-hundred-year-old violin and what it can tell us about forests, abundance, and climate, and ending with on about a prisoner dreaming of seeing the ocean, No Straight Road Takes You There deftly bridges the political and the literary, offering unique insights, nuanced understanding, and inspiration for the challenging work ahead. In her latest essay collection, the award-winning author explores climate change, feminism, democracy, hope, and power and its abuse. Solnit offers a reappraisal of the value of indirect consequences, an embrace of unpredictability, slowness, and imperfection in the politics of how to change the world.

Photos and/or video may be taken at the event.

About the Authors

Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books, including Orwell’s Roses; Hope in the Dark; Men Explain Things to Me; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; and A Field Guide to Getting Lost. A longtime climate and human rights activist, she serves on the board of the climate group Oil Change International, and the advisory boards of Dayenu and Third Act.

Lauren Markham is a writer based in California whose work regularly appears in outlets such as Harper's, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine and VQR, where she is a contributing editor. She is also the author of the award-winning The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life and A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging. Her third book, Immemorial, was published by Transit Books in 2025.

Host or Publisher Mechanics' Institute