Most Popular Books by Susan Sontag

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

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.

"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.

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

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.

A glorious, sweeping new novel from the bestselling author of The Volcano Lover. The Volcano Lover, Susan Sontag''s bestselling 1992 novel, retold the love story of Emma Lady Hamilton and Lord Nelson with consummate power. In her enthralling new novel--once again based on a real story--Sontag shows us our own country on the cusp of modernity. In 1876 a group of Poles led by Maryna Zalewska, Poland''s greatest actress, travel to California to found a "utopian" commune. Maryna, who has renounced her career, is accompanied by her small son and husband; in her entourage is a rising young writer who is in love with her. The novel portrays a West that is still largely empty, where white settlers confront native Californians and Asian coolies. The image of America, and of California--as fantasy, as escape, as radical simplification--constantly meets a more complex reality. The commune fails and most of the émigrés go home, but Maryna stays and triumphs on the American stage. In America is a big, juicy, surprising book--about a woman''s search for self-transformation, about the fate of idealism, about the world of the theater--that will captivate its readers from the first page. It is Sontag''s most delicious, most brilliant achievement. In America is the winner of the 2000 National Book Award for Fiction.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

"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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

This unconventional, bestselling historical romance from the National Book Award-winning author of In America touches on themes of sex and revolution, the fate of nature, art and the collector''s obsessions, and, above all, love. Immerse yourself in the various hues of 18th century Naples brought to life in The Volcano Lover. Susan Sontag audaciously unfolds the intertwined lives of the esteemed Sir William Hamilton, his illustrious wife Emma and the valiant Lord Nelson. Set within a vibrant historical tapestry, the narrative is studded with luminaries of the epoch. Going beyond the boundaries of a traditional historical romance, it delves into deeper intellectual terrains. Inspired by figures from the annals of history, Sontag imparts them with a vibrancy that transcends the pages. Experience the raw power of Vesuvius that stands as an ever-looming symbol, reflecting the tumultuous lives at its foothills. With its unique blend of feminist themes and riveting storytelling, this book offers an invaluable addition to the canon of American literature.

"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.