'The ultimate Camp statement: it's good because it's awful.' These two classic essays were the first works of criticism to break down the boundaries between 'high' and 'low' culture, and made Susan Sontag a literary sensation. Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.
Photographs are everywhere. They have the power to shock, idealize or seduce, they create a sense of nostalgia and act as a memorial, and they can be used as evidence against us or to identify us. This title examines the ways in which we use these omnipresent images to manufacture a sense of reality and authority in our lives.
Susan Sontag is most often remembered as a brilliant essayist - inquisitive, analytical, fearlessly outspoken. Yet all throughout her life, she also wrote short stories: fictions which wrestled with those ideas and preoccupations she couldn't address in essay form. These short fictions are allegories, parables, autobiographical vignettes, each capturing an authentic fragment of life, dramatizing Sontag's private griefs and fears.
Stories collects all of Sontag's short fiction for the first time. This astonishingly versatile collection showcases its peerless writer at the height of her powers. For any Sontag fan, it is an unmissable testament to her creative achievements.
Photographs are everywhere. They have the power to shock, idealize or seduce, they create a sense of nostalgia and act as a memorial, and they can be used as evidence against us or to identify us. This title examines the ways in which we use these omnipresent images to manufacture a sense of reality and authority in our lives.
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 Sontag's best known and important works published in Penguin Modern Classics. Against Interpretation was Susan Sontag's 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 Sontag's 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' T he Times
In these two texts, Sontag shows how the metaphors surrounding certain illnesses, especially cancer, add greatly to the suffering of the patients and often inhibit them from seeking proper treatment. Examples of metaphor are taken from medical and psychiatric thinking, as well as literary sources.
Biographical noteSusan Sontag was born in Manhattan in 1933 and studied at the universities of Chicago, Harvard and Oxford. She is the author of four novels, 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. She died in December 2004. Main descriptionThe story of In America is inspired by the emigration to America in 1876 of Helena Modrzejewska, Poland's most celebrated actress, accompanied by her husband, Count Karol Chlapowski, her fifteen-year-old son, Rudolf, the young journalist and future author of Quo Vadis, Henryk Sienkiewicz, and a few friends; their brief sojourn in Anaheim, California; and Modrzejewska's subsequent triumphant career on the American stage under the name Helena Modjeska.
This collection of essays contains some of the most important pieces of criticism of the twentieth century, including the classics 'The Aesthetics of Silence', a brilliant account of language, thought and consciousness, and 'Trip to Hanoi', written during the Vietnam War. Here too is an excoriating account of America's identity and future, a robust and surprising discussion of pornography and other richly rewarding writings on art, film, literature and politics.
A selection from Susan Sontag's private diaries written in her youth and early adulthood. It features the young Sontag's complex self-awareness. It also shares in her encounters with the writers who informed her thinking.
Gathers sixteen essays which reflect on the personally liberating nature of literature, on political activism as an ethical duty, and address the dilemmas of post-9/11 America. A passionate, compelling work from an American writer at the height of her powers.
Main descriptionFirst published in 1967, Death Kit is a classic of modern fiction. Blending realism and dream, Susan Sontag's second novel offers a passionate exploration of the recesses of the American conscience.The novel is a narrative of the suffering of Dalton 'Diddy' Harron, told through his own observations. He works in advertising for a microscope manufacturer, is thirty-three and divorced and a month ago tried to commit suicide. The haphazard events of his life, including killing a railway worker and falling in love with a blind girl, are brought to us through the lens of Diddy's own mind. We follow him through his journey to justify his actions and exorcise his inner demons, but we can see what is happening to Diddy only from inside his head, in the present, and the balance of his mind does not always bear close scrutiny.
Contains sixteen essays that represent the last pieces written by Susan Sontag in the years before her death in 2004. Reflecting on literature, photography and art, post-9/11 America and political activism, these essays encompass the themes that dominated Sontag's life and work.
Based on the lives of Sir William Hamilton, his celebrated wife, Emma, and Lord Nelson, this novel is about sex and revolution, the fate of nature, art and the collector's obsession, and love. The author also wrote "The Benefactor", "Death Kit", "AIDS and its Metaphors" and "The Way We Live Now".
A selection from Susan Sontag's early writings about the arts and contemporary culture. As well as the title essay, "On Style" and "Notes on Camp", the book includes discussions of such figures as Sartre, Simone Weil, Georg Kovacs, Levi-Strauss, Artaud, Genet, Brecht, Beckett, Bresson and Godard.
This collection of over 40 essays, written between 1980 and 2000, illustrates the array of Susan Sontag's interests, passions, observations and ideas. It also records her engagement with some of the most significant aesthetic and moral issues of the late 20th century.
