Susan Sontag
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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...
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Like Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Marguerite Duras, Susan Sontag has come to filmmaking in the course of a career as a novelist and essayist. In 1968 she accepted a Swedish studio's invitation to write and direct a move in Stockholm. Duet for Cannibals is the result.
Frederic Tuten, in Vogue magazine, wrote: "Duet for Cannibals is a witty, bone-dry serio-comedy that fascinates and disturbs in turn...Dr. Arthur Bauer, attractive in...
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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...
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Promised Lands is famed writer and critic Susan Sontag's sole documentary project (and her third directorial effort), shot in Israel on the fly in the final days and immediate aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Not only does the film scrutinize the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict, but it also brilliantly underscores the deepening divisions within Jewish thought over the very question of Palestinian sovereignty as well. Banned by Israeli authorities...
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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,...
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Susan Sontag made her directorial debut with this definition-defying, dryly funny psychological serio-comedy. The result, revolving around the quadrangular relationship between an arrogant ex-revolutionist German intellectual exile, his elegant wife, their Swedish student secretary, and the earnest secretary's bride-to-be, is a roundelay of partner-swapping that gradually drifts towards uncharted territory, gamesmanship that broaches the surreal and...
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Susan Sontag's 1997 text, On Photography, brought photographic theory into the university classroom with its staunch defense of the medium as art and inspired a new wave of Marxist Criticism in the field. Sontag explains the way in which we are addicted to images and depend on them for knowledge of our surroundings and the problems and challenges this causes.
Already an established academic figure, Sontag brought Walter Benjamin's theories in into...