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...

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.

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

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 this investigation of the role of imagery in our culture, Susan Sontag cuts through circular arguments about how pictures can inspire...

Examines the fantasies, metaphors, and imagery connected with cancer, tuberculosis, and other types of illnesses.

Deserted villages of rural Mexico, where images and memories of the past linger like unquiet ghosts, haunted the imaginations of the author. In one such village of the mind, Comala, he set his classic novel Pedro Páramo, a dream-like tale that intertwines a man's quest to find his lost father and reclaim his patrimony with the father's obsessive love for a woman who will not be possessed, Susana San Juan.

"A new collection of Susan Sontag's essays about women, edited by David Rieff and introduced by Merve Emre"-- Susan Sontag was one of the most formidable, original, and influential thinkers of the last century. "The most interesting ideas are heresies," she remarked, and indeed, her writing rejects the familiar and refuses party lines. On Women presents seven essays and exchanges, spanning a range of subjects: the challenges and humiliations women...