The Faraway Nearby

By: Rebecca Solnit

Narrated by: Rebecca Solnit

This personal, lyrical narrative about storytelling and empathy from award winner Rebecca Solnit is a fitting companion to her beloved A Field Guide for Getting Lost.

In this exquisitely written new audiobook 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.

©2013 Rebecca Solnit (P)2014 Audible Inc.

A beautiful collection of thoughts

The author does a seamless job weaving these various narrations together. There are stories about aging, death, revolution, religion, just to name a few, and they are brought together beautifully.

moments of brilliance, passages of depth

But struggled to stay with it and finish, which I did. Apricots will always have more meaning now .... as my mother ages.

My favorite writer/poet/prose artist!

Would you consider the audio edition of The Faraway Nearby to be better than the print version?

I love hearing this woman's lilting voice as she reads her own written words.

Who was your favorite character and why?

The entire book is beautiful, emotional, insightful, lovely.

What does Rebecca Solnit bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

Her voice. The depth of emotion comes through as her truth, which is an additional dimension to the story. Lovely and visionary.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

Yep. Twice

Any additional comments?

This woman is amazing. Highly intellectual, yet more than anything, insightful and spiritual. Thank you, Rebecca.

beautiful Solnit, as always

excellent book about the untouchable ideas that mean the most to us. rebecca solnit is a f&$king genius.

As near perfection as is achievable

A beautiful intricate clockwork of a book, in which one gear turns another and another and they somehow come back to the first and are all turning and working together, driven by the spring of the authors perception and imagination. And, thankfully, performed by the author - no other could have done it justice.