Susan Sontag

"Susan Sontag has said that her earliest idea of what a writer should be was "some-one 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."--Jacket.

A collection of short fiction from the groundbreaking essayist, novelist, and political activist includes allegories and parables as she wrestles with topics that made up her private sorrows and fears. "Susan Sontag was one of our foremost public intellectuals, a world-renowned essayist, playwright, novelist, activist, and director. Her name is surpassed only by her immense and invaluable body of work. Debriefing collects all of Sontag's shorter...

These essays, which Sontag calls "case studies for an aesthetic," include discussions of Camus, Sartre, Genet, Simone Weil, Ionesco, Brecht, Peter Weiss, Beckett, Arthur Miller, Godard, Resnais, Underground Movies, Psychoanalysis, and Happenings--plus the "Notes on 'Camp'."

With the publication of her first book, Against Interpretation, in 1966, Susan Sontag placed herself at the forefront of an era of cultural and political transformation. "What is important now," she wrote, "is to recover our senses ... In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art." She would remain a catalyzing presence, whether writing about camp sensibility, the films of Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, her experiences as a traveler to...

A second volume of journals shares intimate reflections on the writer's artistic and political development during a trip to Hanoi at the peak of the Vietnam War and throughout her film-making years in Sweden before the dawn of the Reagan era.

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...