Synopses & Reviews
Thirty-five years after her first collection, the now classic
Against Interpretation, America's most important essayist has chosen more than forty longer and shorter pieces from the last twenty years. Divided into three sections, the first "Reading" includes ardent pieces on writers from her 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 theater. 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.
Susan Sontag became a cultural figure upon the publication of her pathbreaking collection of essays
Against Interpretation in 1966. She went on to write four novels, including
In America, which won the National Book Award for Fiction, as well as a collection of stories, several plays, and seven subsequent works of nonfiction, among them
On Photography,
Illness as Metaphor, and
Regarding the Pain of Others. Her many international honors included the Jerusalem Prize in 2001 and the Friedenspreis (Peace Prize) of the German Book Trade in 2003. She died in New York City on December 28, 2004. 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 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. "Her criticism is art in its own right, so gorgeously formed and creative, so vital and searching, deeply rooted in passionately intelligent reading and unstinting curiosity . . . A substantial and wonderfully musical collection that makes matters literary and artistic urgent and thrilling."Booklist "Where the Stress Falls gathers the past two decades of [Sontag's] critical work, and contains fine brief accounts of Howard Hodgkin and Robert Mapplethorpe, Lincoln Kirstein and Joseph Brodsky. The introductions to several volumes of photography are so enticing they make me want to see the pictures, while 'Thirty Years Later,' a new preface to Against Interpretation, will prove central to any account of her career."Michael Gorra, The Times Literary Supplement (London)
"What ultimately matters is what she has defended: the life of the mind, and the necessity for reading and writing as 'a way of being fully human.' She has been a great explainer, but her explanations are not reductive . . . She regroups the familiar and makes the eye fresh . . . She stands for what is articulate, independent, exploratory: for the self as a work in progress."Hilary Mantel, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Her account of staying in starved and bombarded Sarajevo, and helping a multiethnic theater group to produce an adaptation of Waiting for Godot, is a beautifully written example of something that is very difficult to bring off in these cynical times: a genuine intervention by an engaged intellectual . . . Although she is unmistakably American and modernist in her style, Sontag is probably the most Europeanized of our current critics . . . In Susan Sontag, America can boast a rooted cosmopolitan."Christopher Hitchens, Newsday
"Three essaysthe longest [ones] in the bookare of unquestioned lasting importance. They are Writing Itself: On Roland Barthes, Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo, and the title essay . . . [which] is a stunning tour de force."The Houston Chronicle
"Her criticism is art in its own right, so gorgeously formed and creative, so vital and searching, deeply rooted in passionately intelligent reading and unstinting curiosity . . . A substantial and wonderfully musical collection that makes matters literary and artistic urgent and thrilling."0 Booklist
"[The essays] invariably also leave one with the urgent desire to read the book or see the painting, play, or dance she describes. Her passion evokes that urgency."Bookforum
"Where the Stress Falls raises the bar of criticism to the highest level . . . Her energy infuses every word in the collection."The Seattle Times
"An attractive and interesting collection from an important cultural thinker."Library Journal
"One of the few Americans to manage superbly the dual roles of public intellectual and novelist . . . First and foremost an essayist, Sontag tackles varied interests that are compelling in part for their apparent randomness. This new collection of occasional articles includes punditry on literature, film, photography, theater and her own literary career, among other subjects."Publishers Weekly
Review
"One of the few Americans to manage superbly the dual roles of public intellectual and novelist....There is no one quite like Sontag, and her many admirers will enjoy following up on her reading tips and engaging in debate with her via this book." Ivan R. Dee, Publishers Weekly
Review
"[H]er criticism is art in its own right, so gorgeously formed and creative, so vital and searching, deeply rooted in passionately intelligent reading and unstinting curiosity....a substantial and wonderfully musical collection that makes matters literary and artistic urgent and thrilling." Donna Seaman, Booklist
Synopsis
Thirty-five years after her first collection, the now classic Against Interpretation, America's most important essayist has chosen more than forty longer and shorter pieces from the last twenty years. Divided into three sections, the first "Reading" includes ardent pieces on writers from her 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 theater. 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.
Synopsis
Thirty-five years after her first collection, the now classic "Against Interpretation, America's most important essayist has chosen more than forty longer and shorter pieces from the last twenty years. Divided into three sections, the first "Reading" includes ardent pieces on writers from her 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 theater. 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.
Synopsis
Thirty-five years after her first collection, the now classic
Against Interpretation, America's most important essayist has chosen more than forty longer and shorter pieces from the last twenty years. Divided into three sections, the first "Reading" includes ardent pieces on writers from her 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 theater. 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.
Susan Sontag became a cultural figure upon the publication of her pathbreaking collection of essays
Against Interpretation in 1966. She went on to write four novels, including
In America, which won the National Book Award for Fiction, as well as a collection of stories, several plays, and seven subsequent works of nonfiction, among them
On Photography,
Illness as Metaphor, and
Regarding the Pain of Others. Her many international honors included the Jerusalem Prize in 2001 and the Friedenspreis (Peace Prize) of the German Book Trade in 2003. She died in New York City on December 28, 2004. 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 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. "Her criticism is art in its own right, so gorgeously formed and creative, so vital and searching, deeply rooted in passionately intelligent reading and unstinting curiosity . . . A substantial and wonderfully musical collection that makes matters literary and artistic urgent and thrilling."Booklist "Where the Stress Falls gathers the past two decades of [Sontag's] critical work, and contains fine brief accounts of Howard Hodgkin and Robert Mapplethorpe, Lincoln Kirstein and Joseph Brodsky. The introductions to several volumes of photography are so enticing they make me want to see the pictures, while 'Thirty Years Later,' a new preface to Against Interpretation, will prove central to any account of her career."Michael Gorra, The Times Literary Supplement (London)
"What ultimately matters is what she has defended: the life of the mind, and the necessity for reading and writing as 'a way of being fully human.' She has been a great explainer, but her explanations are not reductive . . . She regroups the familiar and makes the eye fresh . . . She stands for what is articulate, independent, exploratory: for the self as a work in progress."Hilary Mantel, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Her account of staying in starved and bombarded Sarajevo, and helping a multiethnic theater group to produce an adaptation of Waiting for Godot, is a beautifully written example of something that is very difficult to bring off in these cynical times: a genuine intervention by an engaged intellectual . . . Although she is unmistakably American and modernist in her style, Sontag is probably the most Europeanized of our current critics . . . In Susan Sontag, America can boast a rooted cosmopolitan."Christopher Hitchens, Newsday
"Three essaysthe longest [ones] in the bookare of unquestioned lasting importance. They are Writing Itself: On Roland Barthes, Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo, and the title essay . . . [which] is a stunning tour de force."The Houston Chronicle
"Her criticism is art in its own right, so gorgeously formed and creative, so vital and searching, deeply rooted in passionately intelligent reading and unstinting curiosity . . . A substantial and wonderfully musical collection that makes matters literary and artistic urgent and thrilling."0 Booklist
"[The essays] invariably also leave one with the urgent desire to read the book or see the painting, play, or dance she describes. Her passion evokes that urgency."Bookforum
"Where the Stress Falls raises the bar of criticism to the highest level . . . Her energy infuses every word in the collection."The Seattle Times
"An attractive and interesting collection from an important cultural thinker."Library Journal
"One of the few Americans to manage superbly the dual roles of public intellectual and novelist . . . First and foremost an essayist, Sontag tackles varied interests that are compelling in part for their apparent randomness. This new collection of occasional articles includes punditry on literature, film, photography, theater and her own literary career, among other subjects."Publishers Weekly
About the Author
Susan Sontag is the author of four novels, including In America, which won the 2000 National Book Award for Fiction; a collection of stories; several plays, and five works of nonfiction, among them Against Interpretation and On Photography. Her latest book is Regarding the Pain of Others. Her books have been translated into 28 languages. In 2001, she was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work.
Table of Contents
Reading
A Poet's Prose
Where the Stress Falls
Afterlives: The Case of Machado de Assis
A Mind in Mourning
The Wisdom Project
Writing Itself: On Roland Barthes
Walser's Voice
Danilo Kiš
Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke
Pedro Páramo
DQ
A Letter to Borges
Seeing
A Century of Cinema
Novel into Film: Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz
A Note on Bunraku
A Place for Fantasy
The Pleasure of the Image
About Hodgkin
A Lexicon for Available Light
In Memory of Their Feelings
Dancer and the Dance
Lincoln Kirstein
Wagner's Fluids
An Ecstasy of Lament
One Hundred Years of Italian Photography
On Bellocq
Borland's Babies
Certain Mapplethorpes
A Photograph is Not an Opinion. Or Is It?
There and Here
Homage to Halliburton
Singleness
Writing As Reading
Thirty Years Later . . .
Questions of Travel
The Idea of Europe (One More Elegy)
The Very Comical Lament of Pyramus and Thisbe (An Interlude)
Answers to a Questionnaire
Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo
"There" and "Here"
Joseph Brodsky
On Being Translated
Acknowledgments