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1. Susan Sontag: A Biography
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While known primarily as a cultural critic and novelist, Sontag was also a filmmaker, stage director, and dramatist. It was her status as a pop icon that was unusual for an American intellectual: she was filmed by Andy Warhol and Woody Allen, photographed by Annie Leibovitz and Diane Arbus, and her likeness adorned advertisements for Absolut vodka. Drawing on newly available sources, including interviews with Nadine Gordimer, Robert Wilson, and Sontags son, David Rieff, as well as on myriad interviews given by Sontag and her extensive correspondence with her friend and publisher Roger Straus, Schreiber explores the roles that Sontag played in influencing American public cultural and political conversations.
2. As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980
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Used Book in Good ConditionDescription
A Financial Times Best Book of 2012
From the turbulent years of her trip to Hanoi at the peak of the Vietnam War to her time making films in Sweden and up to the eve of the 1980 election, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh documents the evolution of an extraordinary mind. The 1966 publication of Against Interpretation propelled Susan Sontag from the periphery of New York City's artistic and intellectual milieu into the international spotlight, solidifying her place as a dominant force in the world of ideas. These entries are an invaluable record of the inner workings of one of the most inquisitive and analytical thinkers of the twentieth century.
3. Styles of Radical Will
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Styles of Radical WillDescription
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.
4. Regarding the Pain of Others
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Picador USADescription
Twenty-five years after her classic On Photography, Susan Sontag returns to the subject of visual representations of war and violence in our culture today.
How does the spectacle of the sufferings of others (via television or newsprint) affect us? Are viewers inured--or incited--to violence by the depiction of cruelty? In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag 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, to contemporary horrific images of Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Israel and Palestine, and New York City on September 11, 2001.
In Regarding the Pain of Others Susan Sontag once again changes the way we think about the uses and meanings of images in our world, and offers an important reflection about how war itself is waged (and understood) in our time.
5. Against Interpretation: And Other Essays
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Great product!Description
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 famous essays "Notes on Camp" and "Against Interpretation," as well as her impassioned discussions of Sartre, Camus, Simone Weil, Godard, Beckett, Levi-Strauss, sceince-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.
6. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors
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Picador USADescription
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. 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.
7. Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963
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Picador USADescription
"In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself."
The first of three volumes of Susan Sontag's journals and notebooks, Reborn (1947-1963) reveals one of the most important thinkers and writers of the twentieth century, fully engaged in the act of self-invention. Beginning with a voracious and prodigious fourteen-year-old, Reborn ends as Sontag, age thirty, is finally living in New York as a published writer.
8. On Photography
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Picador USADescription
Winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award for Criticism.
One of the most highly regarded books of its kind, On Photography first appeared in 1977 and is described by its author as "a progress of essays about the meaning and career of photographs." It begins with the famous "In Plato's Cave"essay, then offers five other prose meditations on this topic, and concludes with a fascinating and far-reaching "Brief Anthology of Quotations."
9. The Volcano Lover: A Romance
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Set in 18th century Naples, based on the lives of Sir William Hamilton, his celebrated wife Emma, and Lord Nelson, and peopled with many of the great figures of the day, 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.
10. Susan Sontag: Essays of the 1960s & 70s: Against Interpretation / Styles of Radical Will / On Photography / Illness as Metaphor / Uncollected Essays (The Library of America)
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Used Book in Good ConditionDescription
With the publication of her first book of criticism, Against Interpretation, in 1966, Susan Sontag placed herself at the forefront of an era of cultural and political transformation. What is important now, she wrote, is to recover our senses . . . . In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art. She would remain a catalyzing presence, whether writing about camp sensibility, the films of Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, her experiences as a traveler to Hanoi at the height of the Vietnam War, the aesthetics of science-fiction and pornography, or a range of modern thinkers from Simone Weil to E. M. Cioran. She opened dazzling new perspectives on any subject she addressed, whether the nature of photography or cultural attitudes toward illness. This volume, edited by Sontags son David Rieff, presents the full texts of four essential books: Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will (1969), On Photography (1977), and Illness as Metaphor (1978). Also here as a special feature are six previously uncollected essays including studies of William S. Burroughs and the painter Francis Bacon and a series of reflections on beauty, aging, and the emerging feminist movement.11. Debriefing: Collected Stories
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A collection of one of our most powerful intellectuals short fiction
Debriefing collects all of Susan Sontags 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. Sontags work has typically required time for people to catch up to it. These challenging works of literary artmade more urgent by the passage of yearsawait a new generation of readers. This is an invaluable record of the creative output of one of the most inquisitive and analytical thinkers of the twentieth century at the height of her power.
12. Susan Sontag: Later Essays: Under the Sign of Saturn / AIDS and its Metaphors / Where the Stress Falls / Regarding the Pain of Others / At the Same Time (The Library of America)
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LIBRARY OF AMERDescription
An unprecedented collection of the controversial later writings of the greatestand most provocative critic of our time.Susan Sontag was the most influential critic of her time. This second volume inLibrary of America's definitive Sontag edition gathers all the collected essays andspeeches from her last quarter-century, brilliant works whose subjects, from theAIDS epidemic, 9/11, the Iraq war, and the perverse allure of Fascism to painting,dance, music, film, and scintillating literary portraits of such writers as WalterBenjamin, Roland Barthes, Antonin Artaud, Machado de Assis, Jorge Luis Borges,Nadine Gordimer, Joseph Brodsky, W. G. Sebald, Marina Tsvetayeva, and RobertWalser, bear enduring witness to passionate curiosity and expansive intellect. Shebrings to every subject an unwavering focus and intensity, and a deep commitmentto "extending our sense of what a human life can be," as she said on accepting theJerusalem Prize in 2000. An account of her 1993 residence in war-torn Sarajevo tostage a production of Waiting for Godot becomes a meditation on the meaning ofculture: "Culture, serious culture, is an expression of human dignity-which is whatpeople in Sarajevo feel they have lost." AIDS and Its Metaphors marks a furtherdevelopment of the central ideas of her classic Illness as Metaphor, whileRegarding the Pain of Others explores eloquently the troubling moral issues
surrounding photographic depictions of violence, cruelty, and atrocity.