Susan Sontag Books In Order

Novels

  1. The Benefactor (1963)
  2. Death Kit (1967)
  3. The Volcano Lover (1992)
  4. In America (1999)

Omnibus

  1. Illness As Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989)

Collections

  1. I, Etcetera (1978)
  2. A Susan Sontag Reader (1982)
  3. Debriefing (2017)
  4. Stories (2017)

Plays

  1. Duet for Cannibals (1970)
  2. Brother Carl (1974)
  3. Alice in Bed (1993)

Non fiction

  1. Against Interpretation (1967)
  2. Styles of Radical Will (1969)
  3. Trip to Hanoi (1969)
  4. Art of Revolution (1970)
  5. On Photography (1973)
  6. Illness As Metaphor (1978)
  7. Susan Sontag On Photography (1978)
  8. Under the Sign of Saturn (1980)
  9. Italy (1988)
  10. AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989)
  11. Dancers On a Plane (1989)
  12. The Way We Live Now (1991)
  13. The Best American Essays (1992)
  14. Violent Legacies (1992)
  15. Ho*mo Poeticus (1995)
  16. Conversations With Susan Sontag (1995)
  17. Women (1999)
  18. Where the Stress Falls (2001)
  19. Regarding the Pain of Others (2002)
  20. At the Same Time (2007)
  21. Reborn (2008)
  22. Reborn: Early Diaries 1947-1963 (2009)
  23. As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh (2012)
  24. Essays of the 1960s & 70s (2013)
  25. Sontag on Film (2016)
  26. Sontag: Later Essays (2017)
  27. Notes on Camp (2018)

Novels Book Covers

Omnibus Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Plays Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Susan Sontag Books Overview

The Benefactor

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 a certain bohemian demimonde that flourished in France until quite recently. More important, The Benefactor is a novel about ideas especially religious ideas unlike any other: funny, acrobatic, disturbing, profound. AUTHORBIO: SUSAN SONTAG is the author of four novels, The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America winner of the 2000 National Book Award for Fiction. She has also published a collection of stories, several plays, and five works of nonfiction, among them On Photography and, most recently, Where the Stress Falls. Her books are translated into twenty eight languages. In 2001 she was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work.

Death Kit

First published in 1967, Death Kit Susan Sontag’s second novel is a classic of modern fiction. Blending realism and dream, it offers a passionate exploration of the recesses of the American conscience.

The Volcano Lover

Set in 18th century Naples, based on the lives of Sir William Hamilton, his celebrated wife Emma, and Lord Nelson, and peopled with many of the great figures of the day, this unconventional, bestselling historical romance from the National Book Award winning author of In America touches on themes of sex and revolution, the fate of nature, art and the collector’s obsessions, and, above all, love.

In America

A glorious, sweeping new novel from the bestselling author of The Volcano Lover. The Volcano Lover, Susan Sontag’s bestselling 1992 novel, retold the love story of Lady Emma Hamilton and Lord Nelson with consummate power. In her enthralling new novel once again based on a real story Sontag shows us our own country on the cusp of modernity. In 1876 a group of Poles led by Maryna Zalewska, Poland’s greatest actress, travel to California to found a ‘utopian’ commune. Maryna, who has renounced her career, is accompanied by her small son and husband; in her entourage is a rising young writer who is in love with her. The novel portrays a West that is still largely empty, where white settlers confront native Californians and Asian coolies. The image of America, and of California as fantasy, as escape, as radical simplification constantly meets a more complex reality. The commune fails and most of the migrs go home, but Maryna stays and triumphs on the American stage. In America is a big, juicy, surprising book about a woman’s search for self transformation, about the fate of idealism, about the world of the theater that will captivate its readers from the first page. It is Sontag’s most delicious, most brilliant achievement. Susan Sontag is the internationally acclaimed author of three novels, a volume of stories, and six collections of essays. In 1990 she received a five year fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation. She lives in New York City.

Illness As Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors

In 1978 Susan Sontag wrote Illness as Metaphor, a classic work described by Newsweek as ‘one of the most liberating books of its time.’ A cancer patient herself when she was writing the book, Sontag shows how the metaphors and myths surrounding certain illnesses, especially cancer, add greatly to the suffering of patients and often inhibit them from seeking proper treatment. By demystifying the fantasies surrounding cancer, Sontag shows cancer for what it is just a disease. Cancer, she argues, is not a curse, not a punishment, certainly not an embarrassment and, it is highly curable, if good treatment is followed. Almost a decade later, with the outbreak of a new, stigmatized disease replete with mystifications and punitive metaphors, Sontag wrote a sequel to Illness as Metaphor, extending the argument of the earlier book to the AIDS pandemic. These two essays now published together, Illness As Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, have been translated into many languages and continue to have an enormous influence on the thinking of medical professionals and, above all, on the lives of many thousands of patients and caregivers.

I, Etcetera

In eight stories, this singular collection of short fiction written over the course of ten years explores the terrain of modern urban life. In reflective, telegraphic prose, Susan Sontag confronts the reader with exposed workings of an impassioned intellect in narratives seamed with many of the themes of her essays the nature of knowing, our relationship with the past, and the future in an alienated present.

Alice in Bed

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 hero*ine 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.

Against Interpretation

First published in 1966, this celebrated book Sontag’s first collection of essays quickly became a modern classic, and has had an enormous influence in America and abroad on thinking about the arts and contemporary culture. As well as the title essay and the famous ‘Notes on Camp,’ Against Interpretation includes original and provocative discussions of Sartre, Simone Weil, Godard, Beckett, science fiction movies, psychoanalysis, and contemporary religious thinking. This edition features a new afterword by Sontag.

Styles of Radical Will

Styles of Radical Will, Susan Sontag’s second collection of essays, extends the investigations she undertook in Against Interpretation with essays on film, literature, politics, and a groundbreaking study of po*rnography.

On Photography

How do we see the world around us? ‘The Penguin on Design’ series includes the works of creative thinkers whose writings on art, design and the media have changed our vision forever. Susan Sontag’s groundbreaking critique of photography asks forceful questions about the moral and aesthetic issues surrounding this art form. 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. In 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.

Under the Sign of Saturn

This third essay collection by America’s leading essayist brings together her most important critical writing from 1972 to 1980, in which she explores some of the most influential artists and thinkers of our time.

Dancers On a Plane

This collector’s edition is signed by John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Jasper Johns. It’s in perfect condition and in it’s original packaging.

The Best American Essays

Hailed as the single most distinguished showcase for essays, The Best American Essays exhibits the finest writing from magazines and journals across the country. This year Susan Sontag has collected an extraordinary range of talent that includes such notables as Joan Didion, John Updike, Jamaica Kincaid, and Stanley Elkin.

Violent Legacies

In Violent Legacies the acclaimed photographer Richard Misrach has compiled three new ‘cantos’ in his ongoing series of photographs exploring the desert in the American West. The desert has long been a metaphor in Misrach’s art. In Violent Legacies these barren lands, so often romanticized, undergo an eerie transformation at the hands of man and become an unmistakable reflection of militarism, violence, and environmental destruction. Misrach’s political commitment and activism filtered through an ironic counterposing of form and content, as well as his exquisite use of color and composition have never been as powerfully articulated as in these three new cantos. In ‘Project W 47 The Secret’ Misrach reveals classically inspired vistas of the Utah deadlands, tainted forever by their past incarnation as Wendover Air Base the secret training and planning site for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. Aspects of what took place at Wendover still remain classified by the U.S. government.’The Pit’ is a Goyaesque series that focuses on the mysterious death of livestock in very close proximity to a former nuclear test site in the Nevada desert. These photographs are a chilling reminder of U.S. and global nuclear contamination.’The Playboys’ are Misrach’s studies of Playboy magazines that were used for target practice by persons unknown on the fringes of the Nevada Nuclear Test Site. While cover girls appear to have been the principal targets, many aspects of American culture including icons like Andy Warhol, Ray Charles, and Madonna were inadvertently blasted. Susan Sontag uses these cantos as a springboard to an allegorical tale ‘The View from the Ark’ a subtle, yet probing meditation on violence in contemporary society. A postscript interview with Richard Misrach provides background information about the sites comprising Violent Legacies.’The West,’ says Misrach, ‘is such a loaded concept that any representation deviating from the cowboy myth automatically becomes confrontational. Today, a more fitting myth is that of Dr. Frankenstein. Since World War II, the American landscape has been converted into a laboratory where scientists and the military experiment with the most elemental powers of the universe, inventing weapons of mass destruction, and leaving a legacy of violence in their wake.’Violent Legacies sends a stark and compelling message about the land we inhabit and our embattled relationship to it. Though the sites depicted here are all in the American West, they symbolize conditions to be found across the globe and in our own backyards. Richard Misrach unveils a landscape of terrible beauty and great metaphorical power. He asks us to confront the violence in human nature, the skeletons in our closet, the radiant glow on the horizon.

Ho*mo Poeticus

A unique collection of the nonfiction writings of an acclaimed Serbian novelist and essayist offers intelligent and sensitive probings of such issues as nationalism, censorship, and literature, and features probing and revealing interviews.

Conversations With Susan Sontag

Covering the period from 1967 to 1993, this collection of interviews gives attention to Sontag’s education Berkeley, Oxford, Harvard, the Sorbonne and the development of her aesthetic and moral temperament, and covers Sontag’s rich career as a distinguished writer, filmmaker, dramatist and cultural critic.

Women

The photographs by Annie Leibovitz in Women, taken especially for the book, encompass a broad spectrum of subjects: a rap artist, an astronaut, two Supreme Court justices, farmers, coal miners, movie stars, showgirls, rodeo riders, socialites, reporters, dancers, a maid, a general, a surgeon, the First Lady of the United States, the secretary of state, a senator, rock stars, prostitutes, teachers, singers, athletes, poets, writers, painters, musicians, theater directors, political activists, performance artists, and businessWomen. ‘Each of these pictures must stand on its own,’ Susan Sontag writes in the essay that accompanies the portraits. ‘But the ensemble says, So this what Women are now as different, as varied, as heroic, as forlorn, as conventional, as unconventional as this.’

Where the Stress Falls

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 considerations of talismanic writers from her own private canon, such as Marina Tsvetaeva, Randall Jarrell, Roland Barthes, Machado de Assis, W. G. Sebald, Borges, and Elizabeth Hardwick. ‘Seeing’ is a series of luminous and incisive encounters with film, dance, photography, painting, opera, and theatre. And in the final section, ‘There and Here,’ Sontag explores some of her own commitments: to the work and activism of conscience, to the concreteness of historical understanding, and to the vocation of the writer. Where the Stress Falls records a great American writer’s urgent engagement with some of the most significant aesthetic and moral issues of the late twentieth century, and provides a brilliant and clear eyed appraisal of what is at stake, in this new century, in the survival of that inheritance.

Regarding the Pain of Others

A brilliant, clear eyed new consideration of the visual representation of violence in our culture its ubiquity, meanings, and effectsWatching the evening news offers constant evidence of atrocity a daily commonplace in our ‘society of spectacle.’ But are viewers inured or incited to violence by the daily depiction of cruelty and horror? Is the viewer’s perception of reality eroded by the universal availability of imagery intended to shock? In her first full scale investigation of the role of imagery in our culture since her now classic book On Photography defined the terms of the debate twenty five years ago, Susan Sontag cuts through circular arguments about how pictures can inspire dissent or foster violence as she takes a fresh look at the representation of atrocity from Goya’s The Disasters of War to photographs of the American Civil War, lynchings of blacks in the South, and Dachau and Auschwitz to contemporary horrific images of Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, and New York City on September 11, 2001. As John Berger wrote when On Photography was first published, ‘All future discussions or analysis of the role of photography in the affluent mass media societies is now bound to begin with her book.’ Sontag’s new book, a startling reappraisal of the intersection of ‘information’, ‘news,’ ‘art,’ and politics in the contemporary depiction of war and disaster, will be equally essential. It will forever alter our thinking about the uses and meanings of images in our world.

At the Same Time

‘A writer is someone who pays attention to the world,’ Susan Sontag said in her 2003 acceptance speech for the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, and no one exemplified this definition more than she. Sontag’s incisive intelligence, expressive brilliance, and deep curiosity about art, politics, and the writer’s responsibility to bear witness have secured her place as one of the most important thinkers and writers of the twentieth century. At the Same Time gathers sixteen essays and addresses written in the last years of Sontag’s life, when her work was being honored on the international stage, that reflect on the personally liberating nature of literature, her deepest commitment, and on political activism and resistance to injustice as an ethical duty. She considers the works of writers from the little known Soviet novelist Leonid Tsypkin, who struggled and eventually succeeded in publishing his only book days before his death; to the greats, such as Nadine Gordimer, who enlarge our capacity for moral judgment. Sontag also fearlessly addresses the dilemmas of post 9/11 America, from the degradation of our political rhetoric to the appalling torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib. At the Same Time, which includes a foreword by her son, David Rieff, is a passionate, compelling work from an American writer at the height of her powers, who always saw literature ‘as a passport to enter a larger life, the zone of freedom.’

Reborn

‘I intend to do everything…
to have one way of evaluating experience does it cause me pleasure or pain, and I shall be very cautious about rejecting the painful I shall anticipate pleasure everywhere and find it too, for it is everywhere! I shall involve myself wholly…
everything matters!’ So wrote Susan Sontag in May 1949 at the age of sixteen. This, the first of three volumes of her journals and notebooks, presents a constantly and utterly surprising record of a great mind in incubation. It begins with journal entries and early attempts at fiction from her years as a university and graduate student, and ends in 1964, when she was becoming a participant in and observer of the artistic and intellectual life of New York City. Reborn is a kaleidoscopic self portrait of one of America’s greatest writers and intellectuals, teeming with Sontag s voracious curiosity and appetite for life. We watch the young Sontag s complex self awareness, share in her encounters with the writers who informed her thinking, and engage with the profound challenge of writing itself all filtered through the inimitable detail of everyday circumstance.

As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh

This, the second of three volumes of Susan Sontag’s journals and notebooks, begins where the first volume left off, in the middle of the 1960s. It traces and documents Sontag s evolution from fledgling participant in the artistic and intellectual world of New York City to world renowned critic and dominant force in the world of ideas with the publication of the groundbreaking Against Interpretation in 1966. As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh follows Sontag through the turbulent years of the 1960s from her trip to Hanoi at the peak of the Vietnam War to her time making films in Sweden up to 1981 and the beginning of the Reagan era. This is an invaluable record of the inner workings of one of the most inquisitive and analytical thinkers of the twentieth century at the height of her power. It is also a remarkable document of one individual s political and moral awakening.

Related Authors

Leave a Comment