Susan Sontag

Author: Jonathan Cott
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300190808
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 130

Book Description
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."

Sempre Susan

Author: Sigrid Nunez
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698172809
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 131

Book Description
From the author of The Friend, winner of the 2018 National Book Award. "The masterpiece of the ‘I knew Susan’ minigenre" – A.O. Scott, The New York Times A poignant, intimate memoir of one of America’s most esteemed and fascinating cultural figures, and a deeply felt tribute. Sigrid Nunez was an aspiring writer when she first met Susan Sontag, already a legendary figure known for her polemical essays, blinding intelligence, and edgy personal style. Sontag introduced Nunez to her son, the writer David Rieff, and the two began dating. Soon Nunez moved into the apartment that Rieff and Sontag shared. As Sontag told Nunez, “Who says we have to live like everyone else?” Sontag’s influence on Nunez, who went on to become a successful novelist, would be profound. Described by Nunez as “a natural mentor” who saw educating others as both a moral obligation and a source of endless pleasure, Sontag inevitably infected those around her with her many cultural and intellectual passions. In this poignant, intimate memoir, Nunez speaks of her gratitude for having had, as an early model, “someone who held such an exalted, unironic view of the writer’s vocation.” Published more than six years after Sontag’s death, Sempre Susan is a startlingly truthful portrait of this outsized personality, who made being an intellectual a glamorous occupation.

Regarding the Pain of Others

Author: Susan Sontag
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466853573
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 146

Book Description
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 sufferings 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.

On Photography

Author: Susan Sontag
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Photography, Artistic
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description

Styles of Radical Will

Author: Susan Sontag
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466853581
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Book Description
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.

In America

Author: Susan Sontag
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429954302
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 402

Book Description
A glorious, sweeping new novel from the bestselling author of The Volcano Lover. The Volcano Lover, Susan Sontag's bestselling 1992 novel, retold the love story of Emma Lady Hamilton and Lord Nelson with consummate power. In her enthralling new novel--once again based on a real story--Sontag shows us our own country on the cusp of modernity. In 1876 a group of Poles led by Maryna Zalewska, Poland's greatest actress, travel to California to found a "utopian" commune. Maryna, who has renounced her career, is accompanied by her small son and husband; in her entourage is a rising young writer who is in love with her. The novel portrays a West that is still largely empty, where white settlers confront native Californians and Asian coolies. The image of America, and of California--as fantasy, as escape, as radical simplification--constantly meets a more complex reality. The commune fails and most of the émigrés go home, but Maryna stays and triumphs on the American stage. In America is a big, juicy, surprising book--about a woman's search for self-transformation, about the fate of idealism, about the world of the theater--that will captivate its readers from the first page. It is Sontag's most delicious, most brilliant achievement. In America is the winner of the 2000 National Book Award for Fiction.

Under the Sign of Saturn

Author: Susan Sontag
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141976519
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Book Description
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-Jürgen 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.

As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh

Author: Susan Sontag
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374100764
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 542

Book Description
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

Author: Carl Rollyson
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496808460
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 359

Book Description
This first biography of Susan Sontag (1933–2004) is now fully revised and updated, providing an even more intimate portrayal of the influential writer's life and career. The authors base this revision on Sontag's newly released private correspondence—including emails—and the letters and memoirs of those who knew her best. The authors reveal as never before her early years in Tucson and Los Angeles, her conflicted relationship with her mother, her longing for her absent father, and her precocious achievements at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago. Papers, diaries, and lecture notes, many accessible for the first time, spark a passionate fire in this biography. The authors follow Sontag as she abruptly ends an early first marriage, establishes herself in Paris, and embraces the open lifestyle she began as a teenager in Berkeley. As a single mother she struggled with teaching at Columbia University and other colleges while aiming for a career as a novelist and essayist. Eventually she made her own way in New York City after acquiring her one and only publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux. In her later years Sontag became a world figure, a tastemaker, dramatist, and political activist who risked her life in besieged Sarajevo. Love affairs with men and women troubled her. Diagnosed with cancer, she responded with determination, and her experience with illness inspired some of her best writing. This biography shows Sontag always craving “more life” at whatever cost and depicts her harrowing final decline even as she resisted terminal cancer. Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon, Revised and Updated presents in candid and stark relief a new assessment of a heroic and controversial figure.

Freud

Author: Philip Rieff
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226716398
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 468

Book Description
Now a classic, this book was hailed upon its original publication in 1959 as "An event to be acclaimed . . . a book of genuine brilliance on Freud's cultural importance . . . a permanently valuable contribution to the human sciences."—Alastair MacIntyre, Manchester Guardian "This remarkably subtle and substantial book, with its nicely ordered sequences of skilled dissections and refined appraisals, is one of those rare products of profound analytic thought. . . . The author weighs each major article of the psychoanalytic canon in the scales of his sensitive understanding, then gives a superbly balanced judgement."—Henry A. Murray, American Sociological Review "Rieff's tremendous scholarship and rich reflections fill his pages with memorable treasures."—Robert W. White, Scientific American "Philip Rieff's book is a brilliant and beautifully reasoned example of what Freud's influence has really been: an increasing intellectual vigilance about human nature. . . . What the analyst does for the patient—present the terms for his new choices as a human being—Mr. Rieff does in respect to the cultural significance of Freudianism. His style has the same closeness, the same undertone of hypertense alertness. Again and again he makes brilliant points."—Alfred Kazin, The Reporter