SUSAN SONTAG (1933-2004) was an American writer and filmmaker, professor, literary icon, and political activist who became a role-model for many feminists and aspiring female writers during the 1960s and 1970s. She wrote extensively about photography, culture and media, AIDS and illness, human rights, and communism and leftist ideology. The New York Review of Books called her "one of the most influential critics of her generation."
Sontag gained early fame and notoriety through her essays, or "case studies" as she called them in the ground-breaking collection AGAINST INTERPRETATION (1966). Her essays revealed an expansive and democratic definition of art, encompassing such diverse subjects as photography, illness, fascist aesthetics, pornography, and Vietnam. They ranged freely from high modernism to mass culture, from European to American artistic figures, from the aesthetics of silence to the contemporary media proliferation of images and noise. Her career as a writer was characterized by the tension between such oppositions.
Despite a relatively small output, Sontag thought of herself principally as a novelist and writer of fiction. At age 30, she published an experimental novel called THE BENEFACTOR (1963), following it four years later with DEATH KIT (1967). She achieved late popular success as a best-selling novelist with THE VOLCANO LOVER (1992). At age 67, Sontag published her final novel IN AMERICA (2000), which won the National Book Award for Fiction. The last two novels were set in the past, which Sontag said gave her greater freedom to write in the polyphonic voice.
The following books are in ePUB format unless otherwise noted:
== FICTION ==
* The Benefactor (Picador, 2013)
* Death Kit (Picador, 2002)
* I, etcetera (Picador, 2002)
* In America (Picador, 2000)
* The Volcano Lover (Picador, 2013)
== PLAYS & FILMSCRIPTS ==
* Alice in Bed: A Play (FSG, 1993)
* Brother Carl: A Filmscript (FSG, 1974)
== ESSAYS, JOURNALS, & NON-FICTION ==
* Against Interpretation & Other Essays (Picador, 1966)
* The Art of Fiction, No. 143 (Paris Review, Winter 1995). Interview by Edward Hirsch. -- PDF
* As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980 (FSG, 2012). Edited by David Rieff.
* At the Same Time: Essays & Speeches (FSG, 2007). Edited by Paolo Dilonardo and Anne Jump.
* The Complete Rolling Stone Interview (Yale UP, 2013). By Jonathan Cott. -- PDF + ePUB
* Illness as Metaphor (FSG, 1978) -- PDF
* Illness as Metaphor / AIDS and Its Metaphors (Picador, 2013)
* On Photography (Picador, 2011) -- PDF + ePUB
* Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963 (FSG, 2008). Edited by David Rieff.
* Regarding the Pain of Others (Picador, 2003)
* Styles of Radical Will (Picador, 2002)
* Under the Sign of Saturn: Essays (Vintage, 1981 / Picador, 2013) -- PDF + ePUB
