Against Interpretation: And Other Essays

Susan Sontag

Book cover for Against Interpretation: And Other Essays
Book cover for Against Interpretation: And Other Essays

Against Interpretation: And Other Essays

Against Interpretation: And Other Essays

Susan Sontag

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Description

Includes the essay "Notes on Camp," the inspiration for the 2019 exhibition Notes on Fashion: Camp at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Against Interpretation was Susan Sontag's first collection of essays and is a modern classic. Originally published in 1966, it has never gone out of print and has influenced generations of readers all over the world. It includes the groundbreaking essays "Notes on Camp" and "Against Interpretation," as well as her impassioned discussions of Sartre, Camus, Simone Weil, Godard, Beckett, Levi-Strauss, science-fiction movies, psychoanalysis, and contemporary religious thought.

This edition has a new afterword, "Thirty Years Later," in which Sontag restates the terms of her battle against philistinism and against ethical shallowness and indifference.

About the Author

Susan Sontag wrote four novels, The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America, which won the 2000 National Book Award for fiction; a collection of stories, I, etcetera; several plays, including Alice in Bed; and eight books of essays, among them On Photography, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. Her books have been translated into thirty-two languages. In 2001, she won the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work. She died in New York City in 2004.

Critical Reviews

"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

Publishing Information

Publisher: Picador USA
Pub date: 2001-08-25
Length: 336 pages

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