Most Popular Books by Susan Sontag

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

A writer is someone who pays attention to the world," Susan Sontag said in her 2003 acceptance speech for the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, and no one exemplified this definition more than she. Sontag''s incisive intelligence, expressive brilliance, and deep curiosity about art, politics, and the writer''s responsibility to bear witness have secured her place as one of the most important thinkers and writers of the twentieth century. At the Same Time gathers sixteen 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. She considers the works of writers from the little-known Soviet novelist Leonid Tsypkin, who struggled and eventually succeeded in publishing his only book days before his death; to the greats, such as Nadine Gordimer, who enlarge our capacity for moral judgment. Sontag also fearlessly addresses the dilemmas of post-9/11 America, from the degradation of our political rhetoric to the appalling torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib. At the Same Time, which includes a foreword by her son, David Rieff, is a passionate, compelling work from an American writer at the height of her powers, who always saw literature "as a passport to enter a larger life, the zone of freedom.

A discussion of the ways in which illness is regarded pays particular attention to fantasies that pertain to cancer and AIDS.

Susan Sontag has said that her earliest idea of what a writer should be was "someone who is interested in everything." Thirty-five years after her first collection of essays, the now classic Against Interpretation, our most important essayist has chosen more than forty longer and shorter pieces from the last two decades that illustrate a deeply felt, kaleidoscopic array of interests, passions, observations, and ideas. "Reading" offers ardent, freewheeling considerations of talismanic writers from her own private canon, such as Marina Tsvetaeva, Randall Jarrell, Roland Barthes, Machado de Assis, W. G. Sebald, Borges, and Elizabeth Hardwick. "Seeing" is a series of luminous and incisive encounters with film, dance, photography, painting, opera, and theatre. And in the final section, "There and Here," Sontag explores some of her own commitments: to the work (and activism) of conscience, to the concreteness of historical understanding, and to the vocation of the writer. Where the Stress Falls records a great American writer''s urgent engagement with some of the most significant aesthetic and moral issues of the late twentieth century, and provides a brilliant and clear-eyed appraisal of what is at stake, in this new century, in the survival of that inheritance.

Includes the essay "Notes on Camp," the inspiration for the 2019 exhibition Notes on Fashion: Camp at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Against Interpretation was Susan Sontag''s first collection of essays and is a modern classic. Originally published in 1966, it has never gone out of print and has influenced generations of readers all over the world. It includes the groundbreaking essays "Notes on Camp" and "Against Interpretation," as well as her impassioned discussions of Sartre, Camus, Simone Weil, Godard, Beckett, Levi-Strauss, science-fiction movies, psychoanalysis, and contemporary religious thought. This edition has a new afterword, "Thirty Years Later," in which Sontag restates the terms of her battle against philistinism and against ethical shallowness and indifference.

The author''s "third collection of criticism, comprising seven essays. The collection was originally published in 1980. All of the essays were originally published, in a different or abridged form, in ''The New York Review of Books'' except for "Approaching Artaud," which was originally published in ''The New Yorker''"--Wikipedia.

Styles of Radical Will, Susan Sontag''s second collection of essays, extends the investigations she undertook in Against Interpretation with essays on film, literature, politics, and a groundbreaking study of pornography.

Twenty-five years after her classic "On Photography," Sontag returns to the subject of visual representations of war and violence in the culture today. She once again changes the way readers think about the uses and meanings of images in the world, and offers an important reflection about how war itself is waged--and understood.

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.

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.

The Benefactor is Susan Sontag''s first book and first novel. It was originally published in 1963, and 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''.

A captivating tale of love, obsession, and the fate of nature set against the backdrop of 18th century Naples. Volcano Lover is an unconventional bestselling historical romance from National Book Award-winning author Susan Sontag. Based on the lives of Sir William Hamilton, his celebrated wife Emma, and Lord Nelson, this novel touches on themes of sex and revolution, art and the collector''s obsessions, and above all, love. Peopled with many of the great figures of the day, Sontag''s narrative explores the complex relationships between these historical figures against the stunning backdrop of Naples and the looming presence of Vesuvius. With her trademark insight and prose, Sontag delves into the intricacies of human desire and the forces that shape our lives. A thought-provoking blend of history and fiction, Volcano Lover is a must-read for fans of literary and historical novels, feminist literature, and anyone seeking a compelling story of passion and ambition.

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.

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.

Collections of interviews with notable modern writers