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.
Susan Sontag is the author of four novels, The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover and In America, which won the 2000 National Book Award for fiction; I, etcetera, a collection of stories; several plays; and five works of nonfiction, among them On Photography, which won the National Book Critics' Circle Award for criticism, and Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. In 2001 she was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work.
"Susan Sontag's essays are great interpretations, and even fulfillments, of what is really going on."--Carlos Fuentes
"A dazzling intellectual performance."--Vogue
"Susan Sontag is a writer of rare energy and provocative newness."--The Nation
"The theoretical portions of her book are delightful to read because she can argue so well. . . . Her ideas are consistently stimulating."--Commentary
"She has come to symbolize the writer and thinker in many variations: as analyst, rhapsodist, and roving eye, as public scold and portable conscience."--Time