Susan Sontag

A brilliant, clear-eyed new consideration of the visual representation of violence in our culture--its ubiquity, meanings, and effects Watching the evening news offers constant evidence of atrocity--a daily commonplace in our "society of spectacle." But are viewers inured -or incited--to violence by the daily depiction of cruelty and horror? Is the viewer's perception of reality eroded by the universal availability of imagery intended to shock? In her first full-scale investigation of the role of imagery in our culture since her now-classic book On Photography defined the terms of the debate twenty-five years ago, Susan Sontag cuts through circular arguments about how pictures can inspire dissent or foster violence as she 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 Dachau and Auschwitz to contemporary horrific images of Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, and New York City on September 11, 2001. As John Berger wrote when On Photography was first published, "All future discussions or analysis of the role of photography in the affluent mass-media societies is now bound to begin with her book." Sontag's new book, a startling reappraisal of the intersection of "information", "news," "art," and politics in the contemporary depiction of war and disaster, will be equally essential. It will forever alter our thinking about the uses and meanings of images in our world.

The candid and far-reaching interview with the public intellectual and author of Illness as Metaphor, conducted in 1978 Paris and New York. Over the summer and fall of 1978, Susan Sontag engaged in a series of deeply stimulating, provocative and intimate conversations with Jonathan Cott of Rolling Stone magazine. While the printed interview was extensive, it covered only a third of their twelve hours of discussion. Now, for the first time, the entire transcript of Sontag’s remarkable conversation is available in book form, accompanied by Cott’s preface and recollections. An acclaimed author of novels and essays, a renowned cultural critic and radical anti-war activist, Sontag was at the height of her powers in the late 1970s. Her musings and observations in this interview reveal the breadth and depth of her critical intelligence and curiosities at the time. These hours of conversation offer a revelatory and indispensable look at the self-described "besotted aesthete" and "obsessed moralist."

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."

From the author of The Friend, winner of the 2018 National Book Award. "The masterpiece of the ‘I knew Susan’ minigenre" – A.O. Scott, The New York Times A poignant, intimate memoir of one of America’s most esteemed and fascinating cultural figures, and a deeply felt tribute. Sigrid Nunez was an aspiring writer when she first met Susan Sontag, already a legendary figure known for her polemical essays, blinding intelligence, and edgy personal style. Sontag introduced Nunez to her son, the writer David Rieff, and the two began dating. Soon Nunez moved into the apartment that Rieff and Sontag shared. As Sontag told Nunez, “Who says we have to live like everyone else?” Sontag’s influence on Nunez, who went on to become a successful novelist, would be profound. Described by Nunez as “a natural mentor” who saw educating others as both a moral obligation and a source of endless pleasure, Sontag inevitably infected those around her with her many cultural and intellectual passions. In this poignant, intimate memoir, Nunez speaks of her gratitude for having had, as an early model, “someone who held such an exalted, unironic view of the writer’s vocation.” Published more than six years after Sontag’s death, Sempre Susan is a startlingly truthful portrait of this outsized personality, who made being an intellectual a glamorous occupation.

A glorious, sweeping new novel from the bestselling author of The Volcano Lover. The Volcano Lover, Susan Sontag's bestselling 1992 novel, retold the love story of Emma Lady Hamilton and Lord Nelson with consummate power. In her enthralling new novel--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; in her entourage is a rising young writer who is in love with her. The novel portrays a West that is still largely empty, where white settlers confront native Californians and Asian coolies. The image of America, and of California--as fantasy, as escape, as radical simplification--constantly meets a more complex reality. The commune fails and most of the émigrés go home, but Maryna stays and triumphs on the American stage. In America is a big, juicy, surprising book--about a woman's search for self-transformation, about the fate of idealism, about the world of the theater--that will captivate its readers from the first page. It is Sontag's most delicious, most brilliant achievement. In America is the winner of the 2000 National Book Award for Fiction.

This first biography of Susan Sontag (1933-2004) is now fully revised and updated, providing an even more intimate portrayal of the influential writer's life and career. The authors base this revision on Sontag's newly released private correspondence--including emails--and the letters and memoirs of those who knew her best. The authors reveal as never before her early years in Tucson and Los Angeles, her conflicted relationship with her mother, her longing for her absent father, and her precocious achievements at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago. Papers, diaries, and lecture notes, many accessible for the first time, spark a passionate fire in this biography. The authors follow Sontag as she abruptly ends an early first marriage, establishes herself in Paris, and embraces the open lifestyle she began as a teenager in Berkeley. As a single mother she struggled with teaching at Columbia University and other colleges while aiming for a career as a novelist and essayist. Eventually she made her own way in New York City after acquiring her one and only publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux. In her later years Sontag became a world figure, a tastemaker, dramatist, and political activist who risked her life in besieged Sarajevo. Love affairs with men and women troubled her. Diagnosed with cancer, she responded with determination, and her experience with illness inspired some of her best writing. This biography shows Sontag always craving "more life" at whatever cost and depicts her harrowing final decline even as she resisted terminal cancer. Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon, Revised and Updated presents in candid and stark relief a new assessment of a heroic and controversial figure.

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 on ‘Camp.’ ” Originally published in 1964 and included in her landmark debut essay collection Against Interpretation, Sontag’s notes set out to define something that even the most well-informed could describe only as “I know it when I see it.” At once grounded in a sweeping history (Louis XIV was pure Camp) and entirely provisional, Camp delights in low and high culture alike. Tiffany lamps, the androgynous beauty of Greta Garbo, King Kong (1933), and Mozart all embody the Camp sensibility for Sontag—an almost ineffable blend of artifice, extravagance, playfulness, and a deadly seriousness. At the time Sontag published her essay, Camp, as a subversion of sexual norms, had also become a private code of signification for queer communities. In nearly every genre and form—from visual art, décor, and fashion to writing, music, and film—Camp continues to be redefined today, as seen in the 2019 Met Gala that took Sontag’s essay as the basis for its theme. “Style is everything,” Sontag tells us, and as Time magazine points out, “ ‘Notes on “Camp” ’ launched a new way of thinking,” paving the way for a whole new style of cultural criticism, and describing what is, in many ways, the defining sensibility of our culture today.

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.