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 these hard-hitting and deeply personal essays, Nation writer and veteran activist Wen Stephenson traces his search for resolve in the face of our converging climate and political catastrophes.
After three decades of failed international efforts to avoid catastrophic climate change, progressive visions of a better world are now increasingly circumscribed by ecological and social breakdown. The geophysical forces unleashed by carbon-fueled global heating have converged with forms of political nihilism not seen since the rise of fascism in the 20th century. For many, despair has become the only honest response.
Faced with the intellectual, moral, and spiritual abyss created by these intersecting crises, Stephenson reaches back to the ideas of mid 20th-century thinkers Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, Albert Camus, and Frantz Fanon, along with contemporary writers engaged in the climate-justice struggle. Throughout, he poses a question that resonates for many on the left today: If nothing short of revolution can salvage the possibility of a better world, and yet if a viable revolutionary-left politics is nowhere on the horizon, then what does a life of radical commitment look like in the shadow of catastrophes that will not wait?
Learning to Live in the Dark answers not with fatalism or any cheap hope, but with something sturdier: a resolve and solidarity as real as the dark itself.
PRAISE:
“In Learning to Live in the Dark, Wen Stephenson confronts our ongoing planetary crisis in all its horrifying bleakness. But even as he looks into the abyss Stephenson is able to find rays of light within the darkness. This is a book for anyone searching for meaning and hope in an age of crisis.”
Amitav Ghosh, author of The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis
“Wen Stephenson has long been not only one of the ablest thinkers about the climate crisis, but one of the most determined do-ers—an unyielding activist in the fights he describes so well. That makes this an important account on many scores, one that will nourish and sustain you!”
Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org and Third Act; author of Here Comes the Sun
“It’s ironic and paradoxical that Stephenson would name his latest offering Learning to Live in the Dark when there is so much light in this book that elucidates contradictions through an illumination of bold and requisite veracity. These essays deliver on what it will take to retain collective humanity in an epoch of climate catastrophe that demands the politics of solidarity and complexity rather than comfort and deference.”
Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright, climate and racial justice advocate; author of Good Friday: The Death of the US Climate Movement and Pathways For Its Resurrection (forthcoming)
“To search beneath the surface, reflect deeply on what one has found, and write with a fierce honesty about it; that is the path of the finest journalists. You will find that in Wen Stephenson’s essays. His journey is an inspiration.”
James Gustave “Gus” Speth, Distinguished Fellow, The Democracy Collaborative; author of They Knew: The US Federal Government’s Fifty-Year Role in Causing the Climate Crisis
“Stephenson’s approach to the human crisis speaks volumes to me. He knows it is a matter of heart as well as mind. His writer-heroes overlap with my own because they are morally clear and unafraid. Stephenson too is unafraid.”
Todd Gitlin (1943-2022), Columbia University, author of The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage
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.