Most Popular Books by Susan Sontag

A pithy and brilliant introduction to Susan Sontag’s writing on women, gathering early essays on aging, equality, beauty, sexuality, and fascism Susan Sontag was one of the most formidable, original, and influential thinkers of the last century. “The most interesting ideas are heresies,” she remarked, and indeed, her writing rejects the familiar and refuses party lines. On Women presents seven essays and exchanges, spanning a range of subjects: the challenges and humiliations women face as they age; the relationship between women’s liberation and class struggle; beauty, which Sontag calls “that over-rich brew of so many familiar opposites”; feminism; fascism; and film. Taken together, these pieces—relentlessly curious, historically precise, politically robust, and allergic to easy categorization Sontag’s inimitable mind at work.

A series of essays about the meaning and career of photographs.

Publisher Description

"At the Same Time" gathers 16 essays and addresses written in the last years of Sontag''s life, when her work was being honored on the international stage, that reflect on the personally liberating nature of literature, her deepest commitment, and on political activism and resistance to injustice as an ethical duty.

A historical novel follows the efforts of a group of Poles, led by a famous actress, to build a utopian commune in California in the 1870s.

This third essay collection by America''s leading essayist brings together her most important critical writing from 1972 to 1980, in which she explores some of the most influential artists and thinkers of our time.

Alice in Bed is a free dramatic fantasy which merges the life of Alice James, the brilliant sister of William and Henry James, with the heroine of Lewis Carroll''s Alice in Wonderland. It is a play about the anguish and grief and rage of women; and about the triumphs and limitations of the imagination.

From one of the greatest prose stylists of any generation, the essay that inspired the theme of the 2019 Met Gala, Camp: Notes on Fashion Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described. One of these is the sensibility—unmistakably modern, a variant of sophistication but hardly identical with it—that goes by the cult name of “Camp.” So begins Susan Sontag’s seminal essay “Notes on ‘Camp.’ ” Originally published in 1964 and included in her landmark debut essay collection Against Interpretation, Sontag’s notes set out to define something that even the most well-informed could describe only as “I know it when I see it.” At once grounded in a sweeping history (Louis XIV was pure Camp) and entirely provisional, Camp delights in low and high culture alike. Tiffany lamps, the androgynous beauty of Greta Garbo, King Kong (1933), and Mozart all embody the Camp sensibility for Sontag—an almost ineffable blend of artifice, extravagance, playfulness, and a deadly seriousness. At the time Sontag published her essay, Camp, as a subversion of sexual norms, had also become a private code of signification for queer communities. In nearly every genre and form—from visual art, décor, and fashion to writing, music, and film—Camp continues to be redefined today, as seen in the 2019 Met Gala that took Sontag’s essay as the basis for its theme. “Style is everything,” Sontag tells us, and as Time magazine points out, “ ‘Notes on “Camp” ’ launched a new way of thinking,” paving the way for a whole new style of cultural criticism, and describing what is, in many ways, the defining sensibility of our culture today.

This, the second of three volumes of Susan Sontag''s journals and notebooks, begins where the first volume left off, in the middle of the 1960s. It traces and documents Sontag''s evolution from fledgling participant in the artistic and intellectual world of New York City to world-renowned critic and dominant force in the world of ideas with the publication of the groundbreaking Against Interpretation in 1966. As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh follows Sontag through the turbulent years of the 1960s—from her trip to Hanoi at the peak of the Vietnam War to her time making films in Sweden—up to 1981 and the beginning of the Reagan era. This is an invaluable record of the inner workings of one of the most inquisitive and analytical thinkers of the twentieth century at the height of her power. It is also a remarkable document of one individual''s political and moral awakening.

Two decades of indispensable work by a great American writer. Thirty-five years after her first collection of essays, Sontag has chosen more than 40 longer and shorter pieces that illustrate a deeply felt, kaleidoscopic array of interests, passions, observations, and ideas.

Susan Sontag''s celebrated essays on cancer and AIDS now available in one volume. In 1978, Sontag wrote Illness as Metaphor, a classic work described by Newsweek as "one of the most liberating books of its time." A cancer patient herself when she was writing the book, Sontag shows how the metaphors and myths surrounding certain illnesses, especially cancer, add greatly to the suffering of patients and often inhibit them from seeking proper treatment. By demystifying the fantasies surrounding cancer, Sontag shows cancer for what it is--just a disease. Cancer, she argues, is not a curse, not a punishment, certainly not an embarrassment and, it is highly curable, if good treatment is followed. Almost a decade later, with the outbreak of a new, stigmatized disease replete with mystifications and punitive metaphors, Sontag wrote a sequel to Illness as Metaphor, extending the argument of the earlier book to the AIDS pandemic. These two essays now published together, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, have been translated into many languages and continue to have an enormous influence on the thinking of medical professionals and, above all, on the lives of many thousands of patients and caregivers.

The author relates her theories of literary criticism to the total aesthetic experience.

The Benefactor, Susan Sontag''s first book and first novel, originally published in 1963, introduced a unique writer to the world. In the form of a memoir by a latter-day Candide named Hippolyte, The Benefactor leads us on a kind of psychic Grand Tour, in which Hippolyte''s violently imaginative dream life becomes indistinguishable from his surprising experiences in the ''real world.'' Sontag''s novel supplies a fascinating, knowing, acerbic portrait of a certain bohemian demimonde that flourished in France until quite recently. More important, The Benefactor is a novel about ideas-especially religious ideas-unlike any other: funny, acrobatic, disturbing, profound.

First published in 1967, Death Kit--Susan Sontag''s second novel--is a classic of modern fiction. Blending realism and dream, it offers a passionate exploration of the recesses of the American conscience.

"I intend to do everything...to have one way of evaluating experience—does it cause me pleasure or pain, and I shall be very cautious about rejecting the painful—I shall anticipate pleasure everywhere and find it too, for it is everywhere! I shall involve myself wholly...everything matters!" So wrote Susan Sontag in May 1949 at the age of sixteen. This, the first of three volumes of her journals and notebooks, presents a constantly and utterly surprising record of a great mind in incubation. It begins with journal entries and early attempts at fiction from her years as a university and graduate student, and ends in 1964, when she was becoming a participant in and observer of the artistic and intellectual life of New York City. Reborn is a kaleidoscopic self-portrait of one of America''s greatest writers and intellectuals, teeming with Sontag''s voracious curiosity and appetite for life. We watch the young Sontag''s complex self-awareness, share in her encounters with the writers who informed her thinking, and engage with the profound challenge of writing itself—all filtered through the inimitable detail of everyday circumstance.

A collection of essays reveals the author''s interpretation of aesthetics and morality in film, literature, and politics, and provides a provocative study on pornography

In eight stories, this singular collection of short fiction written over the course of ten years explores the terrain of modern urban life. In reflective, telegraphic prose, Susan Sontag confronts the reader with exposed workings of an impassioned intellect in narratives seamed with many of the themes of her essays—the nature of knowing, our relationship with the past, and the future in an alienated present.

A love story set in Naples in 1772 and based on the romantic entanglements of Lord and Lady Hamilton and Lord Nelson.

Here is a collection of interviews that cover the period from 1967 through 1993. Many are translations of interviews that originally appeared in French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish, or Swedish periodicals. Several are published here for the first time in any language. Giving attention to Sontag''s education and the development of her aesthetic and moral temperament, they cover Sontag''s rich career as a distinguished writer, filmmaker, dramatist, and cultural critic. Born in New York City, reared in Arizona and California, educated at Berkeley, Chicago, Harvard, Oxford, the Sorbonne, appointed to teaching positions in English, philosophy, and religion, she is a woman whose restlessly independent and resolutely transcultural temperament was already well established when she boxed up the manuscript of The Benefactor and submitted it to Farrar & Straus in 1962. By 1992, when her much acclaimed novel The Volcano Lover: A Romance was published, The Benefactor alone had gone through twenty-one editions in nine languages.

"Los clásicos son hijos del tiempo. Treinta años después de haber sido escritos, los ensayos ... conservan toda su fuerza e interés. Y no sólo porque los temas escogidos en cada caso continúan en el centro de la polémica contemporánea, sino porque la mayor parte de las respuestas que propone siguen siendo originales e iluminan aspectos de la realidad intelectual habitualmente desatendidos por la crítica. Escritas en un estilo directo, con el respaldo de una enorme cultura, estas páginas trasuntan, a la vez que una asombrosa sinceridad, una lucidez liberadora. Novelista, cineasta y realizadora teatral, Susan Sontag nos ofrece unos textos comprometidos, frescos, inteligentes y llenos de sugerencias ..."--Contratapa.