Where The Stress Falls - Softcover

Susan, Sontag

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099289415 ISBN 13: 9780099289418

Publisher: Vintage, 2003

Synopsis

Thirty-five years after her first collection of essays, the now classic "Against Interpretation", America's 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. "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.

About this title

Review:

Susan Sontag produces a riveting new volume of essays that reflects her polygamous interests in Where the Stress Falls. The American writer, famous for her fiction, is equally prolific in her essay writing, including such titles as Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will and Illness as Metaphor. These latest essays range from her take on the cultural philosopher Roland Barthes, accounts of working in Sarajevo, to the traditions of Western Gardens to the history of travel writing. As she writes of her youthful understanding of her craft, "my idea of a writer was someone who was interested in "everything"'. Perhaps most intriguingly, she revisits her 1966 book, (then her second publication), Against Interpretation and provides an autobiographical context for her essays on Simone Weil, Albert Camus, Pavese and Michel Leiris. In these early works she saw herself as a "pugnacious aesthete and a barely closeted moralist". Sontag fought to pave the way for making photograph and cinema subjects worthy of serious cultural criticism.

Although several of these essays have been written in the last couple of years, many are reprinted from magazine articles and the book forms a thought-provoking collection rather than a selection of new writing. Given Sontag's outspoken views on the recent events in America and Afghanistan, it is rather frustrating that there isn't more of her political writing in this volume and it is hard to understand why certain "interludes" were chosen. But as always with Sontag, there is much for even the faint-hearted to savour and ponder. --Julie Wheelwright

Review:

'As luminous and wide-ranging a volume of criticism as one could wish for’ -- The Economist

‘Like all the best intellectuals, Sontag manages to be at once lucid and erudite.' -- Terry Eagleton

‘One can only regard with awe the vigour of Sontag’s appetite for every form of expression.' -- Rachel Cusk, Daily Telegraph

‘Sontag’s engagement with the work of other writers is never less than passionate... She is never impenetrable, but she is rigorous’ -- Sunday Times

‘The tug and flow of Sontag’s ideas is irresistible’ -- New Statesman

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0099289415
• ISBN 13: 9780099289418
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368