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...

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.

"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...

Two essays address how the myths surrounding certain illnesses, especially cancer and AIDS, can add to a patient's suffering and even inhibit someone from seeking treatment.

"Benjamin Moser's Sontag, a biography of Susan Sontag, is a portrait of the iconoclastic and prolific essayist, novelist, and critic and her role in the history of American intellectualism" --

A year in Paris . . . since World War II, countless American students have been lured by that vision-and been transformed by their sojourn in the City of Light. Dreaming in French tells three stories of that experience, and how it changed the lives of three extraordinary American women.

A memoir of the writer responsible for the avant-garde 'Against Interpretation,' depicts her as a magnetic, outsized personality and a polarizing presence who made being an intellectual a glamorous occupation.