Susan Sontag has said that her earliest idea of what a writer should be was "someone 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. "Reading" offers ardent, freewheeling...

From one of the greatest prose stylists of any generation, the essay that inspired the theme of the 2019 Met Gala, Camp: Notes on Fashion. Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described. One of these is the sensibility-unmistakably modern, a variant of sophistication but hardly identical with it-that goes by the cult name of "Camp." So begins Susan Sontag's seminal essay "Notes...

Synopsis currently unavailable.

The Benefactor, Susan Sontag's first book and first novel, originally published in 1963, introduced a unique writer to the world. In the form of a memoir by a latter-day Candide named Hippolyte, The Benefactor leads us on a kind of psychic Grand Tour, in which Hippolyte's violently imaginative dream life becomes indistinguishable from his surprising experiences in the 'real world.' Sontag's novel supplies a fascinating, knowing, acerbic portrait of...

Alice in Bed is a free dramatic fantasy, which merges the life of Alice James, the brilliant sister of William and Henry James, with the heroine of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. It is a play about the anguish and grief and rage of women; and about the triumphs and limitations of the imagination.

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 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.