Susan Sontag Book order

'A brilliant, glittering intelligence' Sunday Times On Women brings together Susan Sontag's most fearless and incisive writing on women, a crucial aspect of her work that has not until now received the attention it deserves Written during the height of second-wave feminism, Sontag's essays remain strikingly relevant to our contemporary conversations. At times powerfully in sync and at others powerfully at odds with them, they are always characteristically original in their examinations of the 'biological division of labour', the double-standard for ageing and the dynamics of women's power and powerlessness. As Merve Emre writes in her introduction, On Women offers us 'the spectacle of a ferocious intellect setting itself to the task at hand: to articulate the politics and aesthetics of being a woman in the United States, the Americas and the world.' 'Boldly provocative' iNews 'On Women demonstrates a powerful mind and equally forceful personality' The Herald

"These two classic essays were the first works of criticism to break down the boundaries between 'high' and 'low' culture, and made Susan Sontag a literary sensation."--Back cover

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

'Magnificent... Her famous seriousness pervades throughout... What's striking is the astonishing scope, potential and possibility Sontag saw in short fiction' Financial Times The complete collected short stories of Susan Sontag, one of the most brilliant and influential writers of the twentieth century Susan Sontag is most often remembered as a brilliant essayist - inquisitive, analytical, fearlessly outspoken. Yet all throughout her life, she also wrote short stories: fictions which wrestled with those ideas and preoccupations she couldn't address in essay form. These short fictions are allegories, parables, autobiographical vignettes, each capturing an authentic fragment of life, dramatizing Sontag's private griefs and fears. Stories collects all of Sontag's short fiction for the first time. This astonishingly versatile collection showcases its peerless writer at the height of her powers. For any Sontag fan, it is an unmissable testament to her creative achievements. 'Sontag is one of the most influential critics of her generation' New York Review of Books

With the publication of her first book, 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.

'As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh' is the follow-up to 2009's 'Reborn', the first in a series of diaries from the late American critic and philosopher 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.

Susan Sontag, one of the most internationally renowned and controversial intellectuals of the latter half of the twentieth century, still provokes. In 1978 Jonathan Cott, a founding contributing editor of Rolling Stone magazine, interviewed Sontag first in Paris and later in New York. Only a third of their twelve hours of discussion ever made it to print. Now, more than three decades later, Yale University Press is proud to publish the entire transcript of Sontag’s remarkable conversation, accompanied by Cott’s preface and recollections. Sontag’s musings and observations reveal the passionate engagement and breadth of her critical intelligence and curiosities at a moment when she was at the peak of her powers. Nearly a decade after her death, these hours of conversation offer a revelatory and indispensable look at the self-described "besotted aesthete" and "obsessed moralist." Sontag proclaims a personal credo, declaring: "Thinking is a form of feeling; feeling is a form of thinking."

This second of three volumes begins in the middle of the 1960s and traces Sontag's evolution from fledgling participant in the artistic and intellectual world to renowned critic.

Susan Sontag's third essay collection brings together her most important critical writing from 1972 to 1980. In these provocative and hugely influential works she explores some of the most controversial artists and thinkers of our time, including her now-famous polemic against Hitler's favourite film-maker, Leni Riefenstahl, and the cult of fascist art, as well as a dazzling analysis of Hans-Jurgen Syberberg's Hitler, a Film from Germany . There are also highly personal and powerful explorations of death, art, language, history, the imagination and writing itself.