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Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag

  • Two decades of indispensable work by a great American writer—more than forty longer and shorter pieces that illustrate a deeply felt, kaleidoscopic array of interests, passions, observations, and ideas

    Thirty-five years after her first collection, the classic Against Interpretation, America’s most important essayist chose more than forty longer and shorter pieces from the previous twenty 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. In the second section, “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.

  • 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, science fiction movies, psychoanalysis, and contemporary religious thought.

  • 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. In “Fascinating Fascism,” Sontag eviscerates Leni Riefenstahl’s attempts to rehabilitate her image after working for Adolf Hitler on propaganda films during World War II. “Approaching Artaud” reflects on the work and influence of french actor, director, and writer Antonin Artaud. The title essay is a study of the life and temperament of Walter Benjamin, who Sontag describes as a sad and lonesome man. The book also includes the essays “On Paul Goodman,” “Syberberg’s Hitler,” “Remembering Barthes,” and “Mind as Passion”.

    Susan Sontag’s writings are famously full of intellectual range and depth, and are at turns exhilarating, ominous, disturbing, and beautiful. Under the Sign of Saturn manages to touch on all of these notes and more.

  • 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.