Showing results by author "Susan Sontag" in All Categories

First published in 1973, this is a study of the force of photographic images, which are continually inserted between experience and reality. When anything can be photographed, and photography has destroyed the boundaries and definitions of art, a viewer can approach a photograph freely, with no expectations of discovering what it means. This collection of six lucid and invigorating essays, with the most famous being "In Plato's Cave", make up a deep exploration of how the image has affected society.

In 1978 Susan 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.  

How does the spectacle of the sufferings of others affect us? Are viewers inured - or incited - to violence by the depiction of cruelty? Susan Sontag here takes a fresh look at the representation of atrocity - from Goya's The Disasters of War to photographs of the American Civil War, lynchings of blacks in the South, and the Nazi death camps, and to more contemporary horrific images of Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Israel, and Palestine, as well as New York City on September 11, 2001.

The Volcano Lover follows the fortunes of a British ambassador, the ravishing woman he marries, and the young British admiral with whom she falls in love. Set in 18th-century Naples and based on the lives of Sir William Hamilton, his celebrated wife Emma, and Lord Nelson, the novel is peopled with many of the great figures of the day.

Originally published in 1966, Susan Sontag's first collection of essays is a modern classic and includes the famous 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.

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.

New York City is not only The New Yorker magazine's place of origin and its sensibility's lifeblood, it is the heart of American literary culture. Wonderful Town, an anthology of superb short fiction by many of the magazine's most accomplished contributors, celebrates the 75-year marriage between a preeminent publication and its preeminent context with this collection of 44 of its best stories from (so to speak) home.

"I intend to do everything...I shall anticipate pleasure everywhere and find it too, for it is everywhere! I shall involve myself wholly...everything matters!" This first selection from Susan Sontag's diaries (from 1947-1963) takes us from early adolescence through to when Sontag was in her early 30s. It is an astonishingly affecting and honest self-portrait which is also a fascinating, revealing account of an artist and critic being born. We see Sontag honing her skills and fashioning herself, by a supreme act of will, into an intellectual force.

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.

Thirty-five years after her first collection, the classic Against Interpretation, America's most important essayist chose more than 40 longer and shorter pieces from the previous 20 years. "Reading", the first of three sections, includes ardent pieces on writers from Sontag's own private canon - Machado de Assis, Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Borges, Tsvetaeva, and Elizabeth Hardwick. 

Sontag's most important critical writings from 1972 to 1980 are collected in Under the Sign of Saturn. One of America's leading essayists, Sontag's writings are commentaries on the relation between moral and aesthetic ideas, discussing the works of Antonin Artaud, Leni Riefenstahl, Elias Canetti, Walter Benjamin, and others. The collection includes a variety of her well-known essays. Sontag's writings are famously full of intellectual range and depth, and are at turns exhilarating, ominous, disturbing, and beautiful.

The Volcano Lover, Susan Sontag's best-selling 1992 novel, retold the love story of Emma Lady Hamilton and Lord Nelson with consummate power. In this enthralling audiobook - 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, and in her entourage is a rising young writer who is in love with her.

Debriefing collects all of Susan Sontag's shorter fiction, a form she turned to intermittently throughout her writing life. The book ranges from allegory to parable to autobiography and shows her wrestling with problems not assimilable to the essay, her more customary mode. Here she catches fragments of life on the fly, dramatizes her private griefs and fears, lets characters take her where they will. The result is a collection of remarkable brilliance, versatility, and charm.