LEARNING TO LIVE IN THE DARK
Essays in a Time of Catastrophe
Wen Stephenson
Haymarket Books (11 May, 2025)
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9798888903759 • US $18.95 • 5 in x 8 in • 256 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In this series of personal and political essays, veteran writer and activist Wen Stephenson explores what it means to yearn for a better world and refuse to look away from the darkest depths of climate despair.
As the climate crisis worsens all around the globe, so does the perennial battle of hope and despair. For writer and activist Wen Stephenson, that battle is political, intellectual, moral, and spiritual.
In Learning to Live in the Dark, he traces his evolution: first facing the climate-and-political abyss through a close reading of Hannah Arendt in the first year of the Trump era; responding to fatalistic climate doomists such as Roy Scranton and William T. Vollmann; his renewed political engagement via the Green New Deal and his ongoing commitment to nonviolent direct action in solidarity with the global poor; and a personal reckoning in the depths of the COVID pandemic and the aftermath of the 2020 election.
Engaging with thinkers from Thoreau and Dostoevsky to Arendt, Simone Weil, Albert Camus, and Frantz Fanon—as well as contemporary writers such as Bill McKibben, Andreas Malm, China Miéville, and Olúfémi Táíwò—the book ends with a question that has become increasingly resonant for millions of people today: If nothing short of revolution, in some form, can salvage the possibility of a better world, ecologically and socially, and yet if a viable revolutionary-left politics is nowhere on offer, then what does a life of radical commitment look like in the face of our catastrophes?
In the face of soothing but toothless “solutions” to the multiple crises facing us, Learning to Live in the Dark offers hope of a sturdier kind: a sharp-edged tool for use in our own liberation.
PRAISE:
Praise for What We’re Fighting for Now Is Each Other:
“Wen Stephenson has written nothing less than a love letter to the student organizers, preachers, and frontline fighters struggling for climate justice across the United States. Together, these portraits coalesce into an impassioned call to action, offering a deep well of wisdom for any person coming to terms with the climate crisis.”
Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything
“This is a young, fascinating, in-motion movement, and Wen Stephenson captures it with grace and power. I learned a good deal about things I thought I already understood.”
Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org
“Impassioned, provocative, beautifully written.”
Daily Beast
“In this harrowing, compelling call to action, Stephenson argues for radicalism, for a moral and even spiritual awakening similar to what fueled 19th century abolitionism.”
Boston Globe
“Thoughtful and self-aware…Stephenson grapples with the existential threat of environmental catastrophe by turning his gaze outward, onto the foot soldiers of the young and growing climate justice movement.”
Chicago Tribune
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Wen Stephenson is a veteran journalist, essayist, and climate-justice activist. A contributing writer for The Nation since 2013, and a frequent contributor to The Baffler and Los Angeles Review of Books, he is the author of What We’re Fighting for Now Is Each Other: Dispatches From the Front Lines of Climate Justice . He has written for many publications, among them The Atlantic, Slate, The New York Times Book Review, and The Boston Globe. A former editor at The Atlantic, he has also served as the editor of the Sunday Boston Globe Ideas section and the senior producer of NPR’s On Point . In 2010, he walked away from his mainstream media career and began to write and engage on issues of climate justice. As a grassroots activist and organizer in New England, he has supported and engaged in numerous campaigns of nonviolent direct action and resistance to the fossil-fuel industry and its backers.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
| Language/Territory | Subagent |
|---|---|
| China, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam | Big Apple Agency |
| Dutch | Sebes & Bisseling Literary Agency |
| English outside North America | David Grossman Literary Agency |
| French | Deborah Druba Agency |
| German | Paul & Peter Fritz AG Literatur Agentur |
| Greek | Read n' Right Agency |
| Hebrew | The Deborah Harris Agency |
| Italian | Berla & Griffini Rights Agency |
| Japanese | The English Agency (Japan) Ltd |
| Korean | BC Agency, or Korea Copyright Center |
| Portuguese | RIFF Agency |
| Russia/Baltics/Eastern Europe | Prava I Prevodi |
| Scandinavia | Sebes & Bisseling Literary Agency |
| Spanish in Latin America | MB Agencia Literaria |
| Spanish in Spain | MB Agencia Literaria |
| Turkish | Anatolialit Agency |
For all other languages/territories, please contact Roam Agency.