Search results for ""author susan sontag""
Penguin Books Ltd In America
The 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.
£12.00
Penguin Books Ltd Where the Stress Falls
Where the Stress Falls is divided into three sections: the first, 'Reading', includes ardent pieces on writers from Sontag's own private canon - Machado de Assis, Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Borges, Tsvetaeva and Elizabeth Hardwick. In the second, 'Seeing', she shares her passions for film, dance, photography, painting, opera and theatre. And in the final section, 'There and Here', Sontag explores her own commitments to the work (and activism) of conscience and to the vocation of the writer.
£14.00
Penguin Books Ltd On Women
£10.99
Penguin Books Ltd Stories: Collected Stories
'Magnificent... Her famous seriousness pervades throughout... What's striking is the astonishing scope, potential and possibility Sontag saw in short fiction' Financial TimesThe complete collected short stories of Susan Sontag, one of the most brilliant and influential writers of the twentieth centurySusan 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.'Sontag is one of the most influential critics of her generation' New York Review of Books
£10.99
Penguin Books Ltd The Benefactor
The Benefactor is Susan Sontag's first book and first novel. It was originally published in 1963, and 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'.
£12.00
Penguin Books Ltd Under the Sign of Saturn: Essays
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.
£12.00
Penguin Books Ltd On Photography
'The most original and illuminating study of the subject.' The New YorkerPhotographs are everywhere. From high art to family albums to legal evidence, they capture and document the world around us. And whether we use them to expose, reveal or remember, they hold an enduring power. In this essential and revelatory volume, Susan Sontag confronts important questions surrounding the power dynamics between photographer and subject, the blurred boundary between lived events and recreated images, and the desires that lead us to record our lives.'Complex and contradictory... one of America's greatest public intellectuals' Observer'Susan Sontag offers enough food for thought to satisfy the most intellectual of appetites.' The Times'A brilliant analysis of the profound changes photographic images have had in our way of looking at the world, and at ourselves, over the years.' Washington Post
£10.99
The Library of America Susan Sontag: Essays of the 1960s & 70s (LOA #246): Against Interpretation / Styles of Radical Will / On Photography / Illness as Metaphor / Uncollected Essays
With the publication of her first book of criticism, 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 Hanoi at the height of the Vietnam War, the aesthetics of science-fiction and pornography, or a range of modern thinkers from Simone Weil to E. M. Cioran. She opened dazzling new perspectives on any subject she addressed, whether the nature of photography or cultural attitudes toward illness. This volume, edited by Sontag’s son David Rieff, presents the full texts of four essential books: Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will (1969), On Photography (1977), and Illness as Metaphor (1978). Also here as a special feature are six previously uncollected essays including studies of William S. Burroughs and the painter Francis Bacon and a series of reflections on beauty, aging, and the emerging feminist movement.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
£28.59
Penguin Books Ltd Against Interpretation and Other Essays
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, Lévi-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' The Times
£12.00
Penguin Books Ltd Regarding the Pain of Others
Regarding the Pain of Others is Susan Sontag's searing analysis of our numbed response to images of horror.'A coruscating sermon on how we picture suffering' The New York TimesWhat is the purpose of images of pain and suffering? Can there be any real justification for the creation, and consumption, of such images?In this seminal volume, Susan Sontag examines the uses and meanings of images, from inspiring dissent to fostering violence to creating apathy. And through this lens she considers the nature of war, the limits of sympathy, and the obligations of conscience.'A far-reaching set of ruminations [...] on what it means to be alive and alert in the twenty-first century' Independent'Sontag is on top form: devastating' Los Angeles Times'Simple, elegant, fiercely persuasive' Metro
£10.99
Johns Hopkins University Press Plays: Maria Irene Fornes
£14.99
Penguin Books Ltd At the Same Time
At the Same Time contains sixteen illuminating essays by Susan Sontag.With a preface by David Rieff.The sixteen essays gathered here represent the last pieces written by Susan Sontag in the years before her ddath 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, revealing why she remains one of the twentieth century's preeminent writers and thinkers.'These sixteen pieces brim over with vitality . . . every one of them opening up fresh lines of thought' John Gray, New Statesman'One of America's greatest public intellectuals' Observer'Excellent and essential' Financial Times'Reads like a greatest-hits album - a little politics, something on photography, some lit. crit. - of Sontag's passions' Daily Telegraph'Sontag's clear thinking . . . shines like a spotlight in dark places' The TimesOne of America's best-known and most admired writers, Susan Sontag was also a leading commentator on contemporary culture until her death in December 2004. Her books include four novels and numerous works of non-fiction, among them Regarding the Pain of Others, On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, At the Same Time, Against Interpretation and Other Essays and Reborn: Early Diaries 1947-1963, all of which are published by Penguin. A further eight books, including the collections of essays Under the Sign of Saturn and Where the Stress Falls, and the novels The Volcano Lover and The Benefactor, are available from Penguin Modern Classics.
£12.99
Penguin Books Ltd On Women: A new collection of feminist essays from the influential writer, activist and critic, Susan Sontag
‘A brilliant, glittering intelligence’ Sunday TimesOn Women brings together Susan Sontag's most fearless and incisive writing on women, a crucial aspect of her work that has not until now received the attention it deserves.For the most part written in the 1970s during the height of second-wave feminism, Sontag's essays are strikingly relevant to our contemporary conversations. At times powerfully in sync and at others powerfully at odds with them, they are always characteristically original in their examinations of the 'biological division of labour', the double-standard for ageing and the dynamics of women's powerlessness and women's power.As Merve Emre writes in her introduction, 'They offer us the spectacle of a ferocious intellect setting itself to the task at hand: to articulate the politics and aesthetics of being a woman in the United States, the Americas and the world.''One of America's greatest public intellectuals' Observer'Susan Sontag offers enough food for thought to satisfy the most intellectual of appetites' The Times'At the time she died, she was America's best-known public intellectual. To my mind, she was also the most exemplary' John Gray, New StatesmanWITH A PREFACE BY MERVE EMRE
£16.99
Penguin Books Ltd As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Diaries 1964-1980
'The only transformation that interests me is a total transformation- however minute. I want the encounter with a person or a work of art to change everything.'Brazen, brilliant and deeply searing, Sontag's diaries wrestle with the profound - exploring ideas and subjects as far-reaching as writing, war, desire and consciousness.From the graphic destruction of war-torn Vietnam to her tumultuous romantic affairs, in the second volume of her diaries, Sontag is profoundly candid and insightful. This instalment charts the years when Sontag wrote the majority of her renowned essays, including the ground-breaking Against Interpretation in 1966. Riveting and enlightening, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh illuminates the mind of one of the twentieth century's most significant intellectuals. 'Her diary entries combine her interests with bright, aphoristic turns of phrase....These diaries are a reminder of the value of the work that made her great, and also mysterious . . . ' The Economist'It is a rare pleasure to read, in her diary, discoveries being made in real time. She applies her mind to itself with enthusiasm' The Guardian 'In its fragmentation and incoherence and passion, its combination of the erudite and the everyday, it is more true to life, both intellectual and emotional, than the most artful novel or careful biography. It may well be that Sontag's diaries, like Virginia Woolf's (which she knew and admired) will come to be seen as just as brilliant and important as anything she wrote.' The Telegraph
£12.99
Penguin Books Ltd Notes on Camp
'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.
£5.28
Penguin Books Ltd The Volcano Lover: A Romance
A historical romance, Sontag's book is based on the lives of Sir William Hamilton, his wife, Emma, and Lord Nelson in the final decades of the eighteenth century. Passionately examining the shape of Western civilization since the Age of Enlightenment, Sontag's novel is an exquisitely detailed picture of revolution, the fate of nature, art and love.
£12.00
Penguin Books Ltd Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors
Sontag wrote Illness as Metaphor in 1978, while suffering from breast cancer herself. In her study she reveals that the metaphors and myths surrounding certain illnesses, especially cancer, add greatly to the suffering of the patients and often inhibit them from seeking proper treatment. By demystifying the fantasies surrounding cancer, Sontag shows cancer for what it is - a disease; not a curse, not a punishment, certainly not an embarrassment, and highly curable, if good treatment is found early enough. Almost a decade later, with the outbreak of a new, stigmatized disease replete with mystifications and punitive metaphors, Sontag wrote Aids and Its Metaphors, extending the argument of the earlier book to the AIDS pandemic.
£12.99
Penguin Books Ltd On Photography
Susan Sontag's On Photography is a seminal and groundbreaking work on the subject.Susan Sontag's groundbreaking critique of photography asks forceful questions about the moral and aesthetic issues surrounding this art form. Photographs are everywhere, and the 'insatiability of the photographing eye' has profoundly altered our relationship with the world. Photographs 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. In these six incisive essays, Sontag examines the ways in which we use these omnipresent images to manufacture a sense of reality and authority in our lives.'Sontag offers enough food for thought to satisfy the most intellectual of appetites'The Times'A brilliant analysis of the profound changes photographic images have made in our way of looking at the world, and at ourselves'Washington Post'The most original and illuminating study of the subject'New YorkerOne of America's best-known and most admired writers, Susan Sontag was also a leading commentator on contemporary culture until her death in December 2004. Her books include four novels and numerous works of non-fiction, among them Regarding the Pain of Others, On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, At the Same Time, Against Interpretation and Other Essays and Reborn: Early Diaries 1947-1963, all of which are published by Penguin. A further eight books, including the collections of essays Under the Sign of Saturn and Where the Stress Falls, and the novels The Volcano Lover and The Benefactor, are available from Penguin Modern Classics.
£9.99
Vintage Publishing Under the Glacier
'Wildly original, morose, uproarious... It is also one of the funniest books ever written' Susan SontagA naive young man is sent by the bishop of Iceland to investigate a small town that has reportedly lost its faith. The church is boarded up and the errant pastor lives with a woman who is not his wife. He has also allowed a corpse to be lodged in the glacier. So the rumours go.What he discovers is a community that regards itself as the centre of the world - earthly yet otherworldly, banal yet astonishing. Brimming with humour, mystery, and the supernatural this is a surprising and moving novel from the Nobel Prize-winning Icelandic author.WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY SUSAN SONTAG
£9.99
Penguin Books Ltd Reborn: Early Diaries 1947-1963
'In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could do to any person; I create myself.'Intimate, vulnerable and unsparing, Reborn bears witness to the evolution of Susan Sontag.With entries dating from 1947-1963, the first instalment from Susan Sontag's diaries charts her ascension from early adolescence to her early thirties. Unabashed, though thoroughly self-reflective, Sontag's diaries reveal the inner workings of her mind, her insecurities and her passions. This compelling account of the evolution of America's greatest post-war intellectual allows us to behold the moral and political awakening of the artist and critic.'An exceptionally vivid, and often moving, account of a young woman's painful journey towards acceptance of her own nature.' Sunday Telegraph 'Moving on several levels . . . thrilling . . . fascinating . . . often reads like a brilliant postmodern bildungsroman' New York Magazine'One can feel Sontag's mind beginning to ripen and bloom, and the full force of the intellectual originality that would be her hallmark emerging' The Guardian
£10.99
Mandel Vilar Press Maestros & Monsters: Days & Nights with Susan Sontag & George Steiner
This is a memoiristic book and a dual portrait, built around intense friendships with two leading public intellectuals who achieved celebrity status—Susan Sontag on a global scale, George Steiner principally in Europe, though also for a time in the US. For audiences at Woody Allen movies Sontag was the prime embodiment of the term “intellectual,” whose famous 1965 essay “Notes on Camp” won her an enormous following. For viewers of French, German and British television over decades Steiner was the primary interview show talking head, igniting controversy on many fronts, while also commanding a loyal audience for thirty years as a book critic at The New Yorker. To know Sontag and Steiner, as this memoir suggests, was often to feel overmatched and yet also bemused and awe-struck. Both of them gave off an air of omniscience and self-confidence, as if they had taken to heart the words of the Nobel laureate Elias Canetti, who wrote, “I cannot become modest; too many things burn in me.”Maestros & Monsters is the work of a well-known public intellectual who was close to Sontag and Steiner over a half century, and who managed to bring them together on several occasions—the only times they ever met. Those encounters are among the most bizarre episodes in this narrative, which also features extended encounters with such literary figures as Arthur Koestler, Edward Said, Phillip Rieff, James Wood and others.
£19.95
HopeRoad Publishing Ltd ARTEMISIA
First published in 1953, Artemisia is a classic of 20th century Italian literature. From its first publication in 1953, Artemisia, a novel about Artemisia Gentileschi, an iconic 17th century painter, by Anna Banti, a brilliant Italian art historian, established itself as a feminist masterpiece. Like Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower and Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian, Artemisia is a book about the process of artistic creation. Much in Gentileschi's life marked her out as a victim - rape at the age of 18, a forced marriage to a man she did not love and, a powerful, patriarchal father, Orazio Gentileschi, who failed to value her artistic genius. But Gentileschi did not accept the status of victim, in the years between 1610 and 1650, she produced over 50 paintings that have established her as one of the great painters of all time. She gave up everything - "all tenderness, all claim to feminine virtues" to dedicate herself solely to painting. Sacrifices that Anna Banti, herself an artist, fully understands and captures in this amazing novel.
£9.99