Dear Festival Friends,

Just when we thought we couldn’t deal with any more of these crazy news cycles, we received Rebecca Solnit’s new book, The Beginning Comes After the End. We can breathe again. 

A follow-up to her bestselling 2004 essay collection Hope in the Dark, Solnit’s latest looks at the many cultural, political, and scientific developments that have transformed the world over the past sixty years. These radical changes, she argues, have helped us better understand one another and, slowly but surely, are making us more connected. Despite a society “rife with white supremacy, misogyny, authoritarianism, transphobia, savage hypercapitalism, tragic consumerism, ecocide, and climate denial,” Solnit, astoundingly, finds reasons to be hopeful about the future.

Like Martin Luther King Jr., she believes that the moral arc of the universe eventually bends toward justice, and we are ready for it! Though authoritarians, racists, et al. try to turn back the clock on history, The Beginning Comes After the End insists that forward momentum is too powerful to stop. “We assume that the present is not in labor to bring forth a future unlike itself—and it is easier to see the old world dying than the new world being born,” she writes. “But beginnings are what come after endings.” 

In her many acclaimed books on feminism, politics, the environment, activism, and the arts, the author calls out humankind’s misdeeds while also offering, against all odds, reasons for optimism. The Guardian said it best, writing that Solnit “is like a seasoned boxing coach tending to the spiritually and politically exhausted citizen flopped in the corner. She mops our brows and offers us motivation.” This motivation stems in large part from her insatiable curiosity—she’s interested in seemingly everything and therefore doesn’t have time to despair. Wanderlust is a cultural history of walking. Orwell’s Roses, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, is a fresh take on George Orwell as an avid gardener as well as an antifascist. Men Explain Things to Me inspired the scathingly funny term “mansplaining.” The list goes on, including River of Shadows, about California’s rise as a film and tech hub, which won the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.

Solnit’s work is an antidote to the cynicism and ennui constantly nipping at our heels, and we’re delighted that she will be joining us at the Festival in May.

Something else we can use right now: screwball TV inspired by 2026 Festival author Carl Hiaasen. On March 3, ABC launched the series R.J. Decker, based on the iconic Hiaasen novel Double Whammy, about a neophyte private investigator tackling corruption and comically heinous villains in the high-stakes world of competitive bass fishing. And the new HBO Max series Rooster stars Steve Carell as a bestselling author, loosely based on Hiaasen, who gets caught up in campus shenanigans at the college where his daughter teaches. It debuts March 8.

Board of Directors
Edward Gale, Chair

Janet Bailey | Juliet Erickson

Andrea Fellows Fineberg | Jenny Kimball

James McGrath Morris | Carmella Padilla

Jenna Scanlan | Mary Sloane

Maria Gale, Ex Officio

Founders
Clare Hertel | Carmella Padilla | Mark Bryant