A pithy and brilliant introduction to Susan Sontag's writing on women, gathering early essays on aging, equality, beauty, sexuality, and fascism

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 face as they age; the relationship between women's liberation and class struggle; beauty, which Sontag calls that over-rich brew of so many familiar opposites; feminism; fascism; and film. Taken together, these pieces--relentlessly curious, historically precise, politically robust, and allergic to easy categorization Sontag's inimitable mind at work.

Includes the essay Notes on Camp, the inspiration for the 2019 exhibition Notes on Fashion: Camp at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Against Interpretation was Susan Sontag's first collection of essays and is a modern classic. Originally published in 1966, it has never gone out of print and has influenced generations of readers all over the world. It includes the groundbreaking essays Notes on Camp and Against Interpretation, as well as her impassioned discussions of Sartre, Camus, Simone Weil, Godard, Beckett, Levi-Strauss, science-fiction movies, psychoanalysis, and contemporary religious thought.

This edition has a new afterword, Thirty Years Later, in which Sontag restates the terms of her battle against philistinism and against ethical shallowness and indifference.

Winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award for Criticism.

One of the most highly regarded books of its kind, Susan Sontag's 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 Caveessay, then offers five other prose meditations on this topic, and concludes with a fascinating and far-reaching Brief Anthology of Quotations.

A brilliant, clear-eyed consideration of the visual representation of violence in our culture--its ubiquity, meanings, and effects.

Considered one of the greatest critics of her generation, Susan Sontag followed up her monumental On Photography with an extended study of human violence, reflecting on a question first posed by Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas: How in your opinion are we to prevent war?

For a long time some people believed that if the horror could be made vivid enough, most people would finally take in the outrageousness, the insanity of war.

One of the distinguishing features of modern life is that it supplies countless opportunities for regarding (at a distance, through the medium of photography) horrors taking place throughout the world. But are viewers inured--or incited--to violence by the depiction of cruelty? Is the viewer's perception of reality eroded by the daily barrage of such images? What does it mean to care about the suffering of others far away?

First published more than twenty years after her now-classic book On Photography, which changed how we understand the very condition of being modern, Regarding the Pain of Others challenges our thinking not only about the uses and means of images, but about how war itself is waged (and understood) in our time, the limits of sympathy, and the obligations of conscience.

Susan Sontag's celebrated essays on cancer and AIDS now available in one volume.

In 1978, Sontag wrote Illness as Metaphor, a classic work described by Newsweek as one of the most liberating books of its time. A cancer patient herself when she was writing the book, Sontag shows how the metaphors and myths surrounding certain illnesses, especially cancer, add greatly to the suffering of patients and often inhibit them from seeking proper treatment. By demystifying the fantasies surrounding cancer, Sontag shows cancer for what it is--just a disease. Cancer, she argues, is not a curse, not a punishment, certainly not an embarrassment; and it is highly curable, if good treatment is followed.

Almost a decade later, with the outbreak of a new, stigmatized disease replete with mystifications and punitive metaphors, Sontag wrote a sequel to Illness as Metaphor, extending the argument of the earlier book to the AIDS pandemic.

These two essays now published together, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, have been translated into many languages and continue to have an enormous influence on the thinking of medical professionals and, above all, on the lives of many thousands of patients and caregivers.

A reissue of Susan Sontag's classic first collection, featuring some of her most beloved writing--on art, life, camp, and criticism--that cemented her legacy as one of the brightest thinkers of, and beyond, her generation.

Susan Sontag is widely regarded as one of the most formidable, original, and influential writers of the last century. Against Interpretation is a modern classic, her first-ever collection and the work that launched her storied career when it was published in 1966. It has influenced generations of readers, and still contains some of her best-known essays, including Notes on Camp, Against Interpretation, and a dazzling range of, well, interpretations. Grand in scope--ranging from philosophy to film to religion to psychoanalysis--and short in length, this pocket-sized, pithy, and profound book introduces a larger-than-life intellectual powerhouse (Leslie Jamison).

A Financial Times Best Book of 2012

From the turbulent years of her trip to Hanoi at the peak of the Vietnam War to her time making films in Sweden and up to the eve of the 1980 election, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh documents the evolution of an extraordinary mind. The 1966 publication of Against Interpretation propelled Susan Sontag from the periphery of New York City's artistic and intellectual milieu into the international spotlight, solidifying her place as a dominant force in the world of ideas. These entries are an invaluable record of the inner workings of one of the most inquisitive and analytical thinkers of the twentieth century.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

A brilliant, clear-eyed consideration of the visual representation of violence in our culture--its ubiquity, meanings, and effects.

Considered one of the greatest critics of her generation, Susan Sontag followed up her monumental On Photography with an extended study of human violence, reflecting on a question first posed by Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas: How in your opinion are we to prevent war?

For a long time some people believed that if the horror could be made vivid enough, most people would finally take in the outrageousness, the insanity of war.

One of the distinguishing features of modern life is that it supplies countless opportunities for regarding (at a distance, through the medium of photography) horrors taking place throughout the world. But are viewers inured--or incited--to violence by the depiction of cruelty? Is the viewer's perception of reality eroded by the daily barrage of such images? What does it mean to care about the suffering of others far away?

First published more than twenty years after her now-classic book On Photography, which changed how we understand the very condition of being modern, Regarding the Pain of Others challenges our thinking not only about the uses and means of images, but about how war itself is waged (and understood) in our time, the limits of sympathy, and the obligations of conscience.

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism

A new edition of Susan Sontag's groundbreaking critique of photography--its problems, politics, and possibilities.

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed, Sontag writes in the opening pages of On Photography, which went on to influence generations of theorists, film critics, and readers everywhere. Originally published in the 1970s, her groundbreaking collection remains uncannily prescient and profoundly precise.

With her singular searching eye, and her refusal to buckle under received wisdom, she presents a rousing critique of the functions of imagery--to seduce, to advertise, to evoke, to commemorate, to conspire, to conceal--across six essays. The result is a damning portrait of the ways we use imagery to manufacture reality and authority that feels as if it were written 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.

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.

A collection of short fiction from Susan Sontag, the National Book Award-winning author of In America and Against Interpretation, and the renowned essayist praised as one of our very few brand-name intellectuals (The Yale Review).

An invaluable record of the creative output of one of the most inquisitive and analytical thinkers of the twentieth century at the height of her power, Debriefing collects all of Susan Sontag's shorter fiction, a form she turned to intermittently throughout her writing life.

Ranging from allegory to parable to autobiography, these stories show Sontag wrestling with problems beyond the essayistic form, her more customary mode. Here, she catches fragments of life on the fly, dramatizes her private griefs and fears, and lets characters take her where they will. The result is a collection of remarkable brilliance, versatility, and charm. Sontag's work has typically required time for people to catch up to it. These challenging works of literary art--made more urgent by the passage of years--await a new generation of readers.

Sontag's incisive intelligence, expressive brilliance, and deep curiosity about art, politics, and the writer's responsibility to bear witness have secured her place as one of the most important thinkers and writers of the twentieth century.

At the Same Time gathers sixteen essays and speeches written in the last years of Sontag's life, when her work was being honored on the international stage. She writes of the freedom of literature, about courage and resistance, and fearlessly addresses the dilemmas of post-9/11 America, from the degradation of our political rhetoric to the appalling torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib.

David Rieff describes his mother's passion in his foreword: She wanted to experience everything, taste everything, go everywhere, do everything. Indeed, if I had only one word with which to evoke her, it would be avidity. . . . I think that, for her, the joy of living and the joy of knowing really were one and the same.

In America is a kaleidoscopic portrait of America on the cusp of modernity. As she did in her enormously popular novel The Volcano Lover, Susan Sontag casts a story located in the past in a fresh, provocative light to create a fictional world full of contemporary resonance.

In 1876 a group of Poles led by Maryna Zalezowska, Poland's greatest actress, emigrate to the United States and travel to California to found a utopian commune. When the commune fails, Maryna stays, learns English, and--as Marina Zalenska--forges a new, even more triumphant career on the American stage, becoming a diva on par with Sara Bernhardt.

In America is about many things: a woman's search for self-transformation; the fate of idealism; a life in the theater; the many varieties of love; and, not least of all, stories and storytelling itself. Operatic in the scope and intensity of the emotions it depicts, richly detailed and visionary in its account of America, and peopled with unforgettable characters.

In America is the winner of the 2000 National Book Award for Fiction.

Thirty-five years after her first collection, the now classic Against Interpretation, America's most important essayist has chosen more than forty longer and shorter pieces from the last twenty years. Divided into three sections, the first Reading includes ardent pieces on writers from her own private canon - Machado de Assis, Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Borges, Tsvetaeva, and Elizabeth Hardwick. In the second, Seeing she shares her passions for film, dance, photography, painting, opera, and theater. And in the final section, There and Here Sontag explores her own commitments to the work (and activism) of conscience and to the vocation of the writer.

Susan Sontag occupies a special place in Modern American letters. She has become our most important critic, while her brilliant novels and short fiction are, at long last, getting the recognition they deserve. Sontag is above all a writer, which is only to say that, though the form may differ, there is an essential unity in all her work. The truth of this is perhaps more evident in A Susan Sontag Reader than in any of Sontag's individual books. The writer selected a sampling of her work, meaning the choice both to reflect accurately a career and also to guide the reader toward those qualities and concerns which she prizes in her own writing.

A Susan Sontag Reader is arranged chronologically and draws on most of Sontag's books. There are selections from her two novels, The Benefactor and Death Kit, and from her collections of short stories, I, etcetera. The famous essays from the 1960s--Against Interpretation, Notes on Camp, and On Style--which established Sontag's reputation and can be fairly said to have shaped the cultural views of a generation are included, as are selctions from her two subsequent volumes of essays, Styles of Radical Will and Under the Sign of Satury.A part of Sontag's best-selling On Photography is also included.

It is astonishing to read these works when they are detached from the books they appeared in and offered instead in the order in which Sontag wrote them. The connections between various literary forms, the progression of themes, are revealed in often startling ways. Moreover, Sontag has included a long interview in which she moves mroe informally over the whole range of her concerns and of her work. The volume ends with Writing Itself, a previously uncollected essay on Roland Barthes which, in the eyes of many, is one of Sontag's finest achievements.

This collection is, in a sense, both a self-potrait and a key for a reader to understand the work of one of the most imporant writers of our time.

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.

First published in 1967, Death Kit--Susan Sontag's second novel--is a classic of modern fiction. Blending realism and dream, it offers a passionate exploration of the recesses of the American conscience.