Susan Sontag

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...

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.

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...

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...

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...

Essayist, novelist, critic, cinephile, and all-around intellectual dynamo Sontag made her directorial debut with this definition-defying, dryly funny psychological serio-comedy, the result of a Swedish studio’s invitation to her to make a film in Stockholm. 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...

Six essays "first published (in a slightly different form) in The New York Review of Books."

A love story set in Naples in 1772 and based on the romantic entanglements of Lord and Lady Hamilton and Lord Nelson.