by Susan Sontag (1933-2004) Written in 1964. First published in 1966. Cover of the 1969 edition of Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation and Other Essays. Photograph on the cover by Peter Huj…
“Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.” Artist Wendy MacNaughton captures Sontag’s most private meditations on love.
A series of provocative discussions on everything from individual authors to contemporary religious thinking, Against Interpretation and Other Essays is the definitive collection of Susan Sontags best known and important works published in Penguin Modern Classics. Against Interpretation was Susan Sontags first collection of essays and made her name as one of the most incisive thinkers of our time. Sontag was among the first critics to write about the intersection between high and low art forms, and to give them equal value as valid topics, shown here in her epoch-making pieces Notes on Camp and Against Interpretation. Here too are impassioned discussions of Sartre, Camus, Simone Weil, Godard, Beckett, Levi-Strauss, science-fiction movies, psychoanalysis and contemporary religious thought. Originally published in 1966, this collection has never gone out of print and has been a major influence on generations of readers, and the field of cultural criticism, ever since. Susan Sontag (1933-2004) was born in Manhattan and studied at the universities of Chicago, Harvard and Oxford. She is the author of four novels - the Benefactor, Death Kit, the Volcano Lover and In America, which won the 2000 US National Book Award for fiction - a collection of stories, several plays, and six books of essays, among them Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. Her books are translated into thirty-two languages. In 2001 she was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work, and in 2003 she received the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. If you enjoyed Against Interpretation and Other Essays, you might like Sontags On Photography, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. A dazzling intellectual performance Vogue Sontag offers enough food for thought to satisfy the most intellectual of appetites the Times
A list of books recommended by American writer Susan Sontag, including work by Goethe, Dante, Leo Tolstoy, James Joyce, Henry James and Aldous Huxley.
Leibovitz acknowledged that she and the late Sontag were romantically involved. When asked why she used terms like “companion” to describe Sontag, instead of more specific ones like …
An entry from 12/3/1961 in Susan Sontag’s journals. (via) The writer must be four people: 1) The nut, the obsédé 2) The moron 3) The stylist 4) The critic 1 supplies the material; 2 lets it come out; 3 is taste; 4 is intelligence. A great writer has all 4 but you can still be a
Show-stopping and nothing less of iconic, we crack open the seminal essay of Susan Sontag and dissect the turnout of camp at the euphoric Met Gala. Billy Porter, Lady Gaga and Katy Perry aside, did this year’s festivities measure up?
“Publicity in general is a very destructive thing, for any artist.”
Yesterday, FSG published Susan Sontag’s Debriefing, a new collection of the writer’s short fiction. I’m always excited to read more of Sontag’s work—which is convenient, bec…
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."
