Books by Susan Sontag
On Photography
by Susan Sontag
Winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award for Criticism.
One of the most highly regarded books of its kind, Susan Sontag's 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."
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On Photography
by Susan Sontag
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
A new edition of Susan Sontag’s groundbreaking critique of photography―its problems, politics, and possibilities.
“To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed,” Sontag writes in the opening pages of On Photography, which went on to influence generations of theorists, film critics, and readers everywhere. Originally published in the 1970s, her groundbreaking collection remains uncannily prescient and profoundly precise.
With her singular searching eye, and her refusal to buckle under received wisdom, she presents a rousing critique of the functions of imagery―to seduce, to advertise, to evoke, to commemorate, to conspire, to conceal―across six essays. The result is a damning portrait of the ways we use imagery to manufacture reality and authority that feels as if it were written today.
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Letters: Summer 1926 (New York Review Books Classics)
by Susan Sontag, Rainer Maria Rilke, Marina Tsvetayeva, Boris Leonidovich Pasternak
Edited by Yevgeny Pasternak, Yelena Pasternak, and Konstantin M. Azadovsky
The summer of 1926 was a time of trouble and uncertainty for each of the three poets whose correspondence is collected in this moving volume. Marina Tsvetayeva was living in exile in France and struggling to get by. Boris Pasternak was in Moscow, trying to come to terms with the new Bolshevik regime. Rainer Maria Rilke, in Switzerland, was dying. Though hardly known to each other, they began to correspond, exchanging a series of searching letters in which every aspect of life and work is discussed with extraordinary intensity and passion. Letters: Summer 1926 takes the reader into the hearts and minds of three of the twentieth century's greatest poets at a moment of maximum emotional and creative pressure.
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Debriefing: Collected Stories
by Susan Sontag
A collection of one of our most powerful intellectual’s short fiction
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. Sontag’s work has typically required time for people to catch up to it. These challenging works of literary art―made more urgent by the passage of years―await 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.
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Debriefing: Collected Stories
by Susan Sontag
A collection of short fiction from Susan Sontag, the National Book Award-winning author of In America and Against Interpretation, and the renowned essayist praised as “one of our very few brand-name intellectuals” (The Yale Review).
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, Debriefing collects all of Susan Sontag’s shorter fiction, a form she turned to intermittently throughout her writing life.
Ranging from allegory to parable to autobiography, these stories show Sontag wrestling with problems beyond the essayistic form, her more customary mode. Here, she catches fragments of life on the fly, dramatizes her private griefs and fears, and lets characters take her where they will. The result is a collection of remarkable brilliance, versatility, and charm. Sontag’s work has typically required time for people to catch up to it. These challenging works of literary art―made more urgent by the passage of years―await a new generation of readers.
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Against Interpretation: And Other Essays
by Susan Sontag
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.
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In America: A Novel
by Susan Sontag
In America is a kaleidoscopic portrait of America on the cusp of modernity. As she did in her enormously popular novel The Volcano Lover, Susan Sontag casts a story located in the past in a fresh, provocative light to create a fictional world full of contemporary resonance.
In 1876 a group of Poles led by Maryna Zalezowska, Poland's greatest actress, emigrate to the United States and travel to California to found a "utopian commune." When the commune fails, Maryna stays, learns English, and―as Marina Zalenska―forges a new, even more triumphant career on the American stage, becoming a diva on par with Sara Bernhardt.
In America is about many things: a woman's search for self-transformation; the fate of idealism; a life in the theater; the many varieties of love; and, not least of all, stories and storytelling itself. Operatic in the scope and intensity of the emotions it depicts, richly detailed and visionary in its account of America, and peopled with unforgettable characters.
In America is the winner of the 2000 National Book Award for Fiction.
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Where the Stress Falls: Essays
by Susan Sontag
Thirty-five years after her first collection, the now classic Against Interpretation, America's most important essayist has chosen more than forty longer and shorter pieces from the last twenty years. Divided into three sections, the first "Reading" includes ardent pieces on writers from her own private canon - Machado de Assis, Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Borges, Tsvetaeva, and Elizabeth Hardwick. In the second, "Seeing" she shares her passions for film, dance, photography, painting, opera, and theater. And in the final section, "There and Here" Sontag explores her own commitments to the work (and activism) of conscience and to the vocation of the writer.
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Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors
by Susan Sontag
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.
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No copies available.
Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors
by Susan Sontag
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.
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No copies available.
At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches
by Susan Sontag
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 speeches written in the last years of Sontag's life, when her work was being honored on the international stage. She writes of the freedom of literature, about courage and resistance, and 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.
David Rieff describes his mother's passion in his foreword: "She wanted to experience everything, taste everything, go everywhere, do everything. Indeed, if I had only one word with which to evoke her, it would be avidity. . . . I think that, for her, the joy of living and the joy of knowing really were one and the same."
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At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches
by Susan Sontag
"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."
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Selected Stories (New York Review Books Classics)
by Susan Sontag, Robert Walser, Christopher Middleton
How to place the mysterious Swiss writer Robert Walser, a humble genius who possessed one of the most elusive and surprising sensibilities in modern literature? Walser is many things: a Paul Klee in words, maker of droll, whimsical, tender, and heartbreaking verbal artifacts; an inspiration to such very different writers as Kafka and W.G. Sebald; an amalgam, as Susan Sontag suggests in her preface to this volume, of Stevie Smith and Samuel Beckett.
This collection gathers forty-two of Walser's stories. Encompassing everything from journal entries, notes on literature, and biographical sketches to anecdotes, fables, and visions, it is an ideal introduction to this fascinating writer of whom Hermann Hesse famously declared, "If he had a hundred thousand readers, the world would be a better place."
Response to a Request
Flower Days
Trousers
Two Strange Stories
Balloon Journey
Kleist in Thum
The Job Application
The Boat
A Little Ramble
Helbling's Story
The Little Berliner
Nervous
The Walk
So! "I've Got You"
Nothing at All
Kienast
Poests
Frau Wilke
The Street
Snowdrops
Winter
The She-Owl
Knocking
Titus
Vladimir
Parisian Newspapers
The Monkey
Dostoevsky's Idiot
Am I Dreaming?
The Little Tree
Stork and Porcupine
A Contribution to the Celebration of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer
A Sort of Speech
A Letter to Therese Breitbach
A Village Tale
The Aviator
The Pimp
Masters and Workers
Essay on Freedom
A Biedermeier Story
The Honeymoon
Thoughts on Cezanne
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Regarding the Pain of Others (Picador Modern Classics)
by Susan Sontag
Beautifully repackaged as part of the Picador Modern Classics Series, this special edition is small enough to fit in your pocket and bold enough to stand out on your bookshelf.
Considered one of the greatest critics of her generation, Susan Sontag followed up her monumental On Photography with an extended study of human violence, reflecting on a question first posed by Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas: How in your opinion are we to prevent war?
"For a long time some people believed that if the horror could be made vivid enough, most people would finally take in the outrageousness, the insanity of war."
One of the distinguishing features of modern life is that it supplies countless opportunities for regarding (at a distance, through the medium of photography) horrors taking place throughout the world. But are viewers inured―or incited―to violence by the depiction of cruelty? Is the viewer’s perception of reality eroded by the daily barrage of such images? What does it mean to care about the sufferings of others far away?
First published more than twenty years after her now classic book On Photography, which changed how we understand the very condition of being modern, Regarding the Pain of Others challenges our thinking not only about the uses and means of images, but about how war itself is waged (and understood) in our time, the limits of sympathy, and the obligations of conscience.
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On Women
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.
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Under the Sign of Saturn: Essays
by Susan Sontag
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.
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Styles of Radical Will
by Susan Sontag
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.
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As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980
by Susan Sontag
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.
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Susan Sontag: Essays of the 1960s & 70s (LOA #246): Against Interpretation / Styles of Radical Will / On Photography / Illness as Metaphor / ... (Library of America Susan Sontag Edition)
by Susan Sontag
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 Sontag’s 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.
LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
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Susan Sontag: Later Essays (LOA #292): Under the Sign of Saturn / AIDS and its Metaphors / Where the Stress Falls / Regarding the Pain of Others / At ... (Library of America Susan Sontag Edition)
by Susan Sontag
An unprecedented collection of the controversial later writings of the greatest and most provocative critic of our time.
Susan Sontag was the most influential critic of her time. This second volume in Library of America's definitive Sontag edition gathers all the collected essays and speeches from her last quarter-century, brilliant works whose subjects, from the AIDS 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 Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Antonin Artaud, Machado de Assis, Jorge Luis Borges, Nadine Gordimer, Joseph Brodsky, W. G. Sebald, Marina Tsvetayeva, and Robert Walser, bear enduring witness to passionate curiosity and expansive intellect. She brings to every subject an unwavering focus and intensity, and a deep commitment to "extending our sense of what a human life can be," as she said on accepting the Jerusalem Prize in 2000. An account of her 1993 residence in war-torn Sarajevo to stage a production of Waiting for Godot becomes a meditation on the meaning of culture: "Culture, serious culture, is an expression of human dignity-which is what people in Sarajevo feel they have lost." AIDS and Its Metaphors marks a further development of the central ideas of her classic Illness as Metaphor, while Regarding the Pain of Others explores eloquently the troubling moral issues surrounding photographic depictions of violence, cruelty, and atrocity.
LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
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Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963
by Susan Sontag
"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.
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Against Interpretation And Other Essays
by Susan Sontag
A reissue of Susan Sontag’s classic first collection, featuring some of her most beloved writing—on art, life, camp, and criticism—that cemented her legacy as one of the brightest thinkers of, and beyond, her generation.
Susan Sontag is widely regarded as one of the most formidable, original, and influential writers of the last century. Against Interpretation is a modern classic, her first-ever collection and the work that launched her storied career when it was published in 1966. It has influenced generations of readers, and still contains some of her best-known essays, including “Notes on Camp,” “Against Interpretation,” and a dazzling range of, well, interpretations. Grand in scope—ranging from philosophy to film to religion to psychoanalysis—and short in length, this pocket-sized, pithy, and profound book introduces “a larger-than-life intellectual powerhouse” (Leslie Jamison).
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Regarding the Pain of Others
by Susan Sontag
A brilliant, clear-eyed consideration of the visual representation of violence in our culture—its ubiquity, meanings, and effects.
Considered one of the greatest critics of her generation, Susan Sontag followed up her monumental On Photography with an extended study of human violence, reflecting on a question first posed by Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas: How in your opinion are we to prevent war?
“For a long time some people believed that if the horror could be made vivid enough, most people would finally take in the outrageousness, the insanity of war.”
One of the distinguishing features of modern life is that it supplies countless opportunities for regarding (at a distance, through the medium of photography) horrors taking place throughout the world. But are viewers inured—or incited—to violence by the depiction of cruelty? Is the viewer’s perception of reality eroded by the daily barrage of such images? What does it mean to care about the suffering of others far away?
First published more than twenty years after her now-classic book On Photography, which changed how we understand the very condition of being modern, Regarding the Pain of Others challenges our thinking not only about the uses and means of images, but about how war itself is waged (and understood) in our time, the limits of sympathy, and the obligations of conscience.
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