City Atlases Books in Order

The City Atlases series grew out of Rebecca Solnit's desire to remake the traditional atlas as a book of stories, not just streets and borders. Each volume combines original maps, essays, and artwork to show how power, memory, and everyday life are layered onto a city.

Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas takes her home region as its starting point. Twenty-two maps pair unlikely themes, such as monarch butterfly habitats with queer nightlife, or murder sites with movie theaters, alongside essays from writers, activists, and scholars. Together they reveal San Francisco as a place shaped by bohemia and labor struggles, redevelopment schemes, and fragile ecologies.

Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas, created with coeditor Rebecca Snedeker, turns the same experimental method on a Gulf Coast city defined by water, music, and deep histories of colonization and resistance. Its maps and texts trace oil and hurricanes, Mardi Gras routes and jazz lineages, prisons and levees, foodways and migration, portraying New Orleans as both imperiled and fiercely alive.

The trilogy concludes with Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas, made in collaboration with Joshua Jelly-Schapiro and a wide circle of contributors. Here the maps chart immigrant languages, punk landmarks, literary neighborhoods, bird migrations, subway lines, and organizing traditions, asking how people keep making culture and solidarity in an unequal global city.

Each atlas can be read straight through or dipped into one map at a time. You might follow a single theme across the pages or simply let unexpected juxtapositions suggest new ways of seeing a familiar place.

Across the series, Solnit and her collaborators treat mapping as a tool for storytelling and imagination. The City Atlases invite readers to think about who is included on the map, who has been erased, and how ordinary lives, protests, and small joys all leave their traces on the streets.