The quote in a frame with blue illustrations around the edge

Sparkle-main-image-1800×120020.jpg

Features

‘No need to sparkle’: why we should all take Virginia Woolf’s advice in 2021

An illustration of a yellow legal pad with notes on, recreated in three different boxes

Main-Yellow-Legal-Pad.jpg

Obama’s secret writing weapon: what is it about the yellow legal pad?

At the Same Time

'These sixteen pieces brim over with vitality . . . every one of them opening up fresh lines of thought' John Gray, New Statesman 
 
At the Same Time contains sixteen illuminating essays by Susan Sontag with a preface by David Rieff. 
 
The sixteen essays represent the last pieces written by Susan Sontag in the years before her death in 2004. Reflecting on literature, photography and art, post 9/11 America and political activism, these essays encompass the themes that dominated Sontag's life and work, revealing why she remains one of the twentieth century's preeminent writers and thinkers. 
 
'One of America's greatest public intellectuals' Observer 
 
'Excellent and essential' Financial Times 
 
'Reads like a greatest-hits album - a little politics, something on photography, some lit. crit. - of Sontag's passions' Daily Telegraph 
 
'Sontag's clear thinking . . . shines like a spotlight in dark places' The Times

At the time [Sontag] died, she was America&rsquo;s best-known public intellectual. To my mind, she was also the most exemplary. Intellectually and imaginatively gifted to an extraordinary degree, she used her fearless intelligence to illuminate some of the deepest contradictions of contemporary life

Intense and insightful . . . some excellent and essential essays

Sontag&rsquo;s clear thinking . . . shines like a spotlight in dark places

A formidable mind . . . America&rsquo;s foremost intellectual . . . [Sontag&rsquo;s] willingness to shoulder the responsibility and complicity for acts that most Americans are only too eager to condemn is the sign of a spirit open to examining any idea except compromise

[A] powerful collection . . . Sontag's brilliance as a literary critic, her keen analytical skill and her genius for the searingly apt phrase are all fiercely displayed here

The sixteen essays represent the last pieces written by Susan Sontag in the years before her death in 2004. Reflecting on literature, photography and art, post-9/11 America and political activism, these essays encompass the themes that dominated Sontag’s life and work, revealing why she remains one of the twentieth-century’s preeminent writers and thinkers.

Collected Stories

Stories

'Magnificent... Her famous seriousness pervades throughout... What's striking is the astonishing scope, potential and possibility Sontag saw in short fiction' Financial Times 
 
The complete collected short stories of Susan Sontag, one of the most brilliant and influential writers of the twentieth century 
 
Susan Sontag is most often remembered as a brilliant essayist - inquisitive, analytical, fearlessly outspoken. Yet all throughout her life, she also wrote short stories: fictions which wrestled with those ideas and preoccupations she couldn't address in essay form. These short fictions are allegories, parables, autobiographical vignettes, each capturing an authentic fragment of life, dramatizing Sontag's private griefs and fears. 
 
Stories collects all of Sontag's short fiction for the first time. This astonishingly versatile collection showcases its peerless writer at the height of her powers. For any Sontag fan, it is an unmissable testament to her creative achievements. 
 
'Sontag is one of the most influential critics of her generation' New York Review of Books

If you are a bibliophile, you need this beautiful hardback in your life... These superb stories show the sheer versatility of one of this century's most inquisitive minds

Susan Sontag is most often remembered as a brilliant essayist - inquisitive, analytical, fearlessly outspoken. Yet all throughout her life, she also wrote short stories: fictions which wrestled with those ideas and preoccupations she couldn't address in essay form. These short fictions are allegories, parables, autobiographical vignettes, each capturing an authentic fragment of life, dramatizing Sontag's private griefs and fears. 
 
Stories collects all of Sontag's short fiction for the first time. This astonishingly versatile collection showcases its peerless writer at the height of her powers. For any Sontag fan, it is an unmissable testament to her creative achievements.

Early Diaries 1947-1963

Reborn

'In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could do to any person; I create myself' 
 
Intimate, vulnerable and unsparing, Reborn bears witness to the evolution of Susan Sontag. 
 
With entries dating from 1947-1963, the first instalment from Susan Sontag's diaries charts her ascension from early adolescence to her early thirties. Unabashed, though thoroughly self-reflective, Sontag's diaries reveal the inner workings of her mind, her insecurities and her passions. This compelling account of the evolution of America's greatest post-war intellectual allows us to behold the moral and political awakening of the artist and critic. 
 
'An exceptionally vivid, and often moving, account of a young woman's painful journey towards acceptance of her own nature' Sunday Telegraph 
 
'Moving on several levels . . . thrilling . . . fascinating . . . often reads like a brilliant postmodern bildungsroman' New York Magazine 
 
'One can feel Sontag's mind beginning to ripen and bloom, and the full force of the intellectual originality that would be her hallmark emerging' Guardian

Fascinating. One can feel Sontag's mind beginning to ripen and bloom, and the full force of the intellectual originality that would be her hallmark emerging

Inspirational. Sontag shows us not just the importance, but the exhilaration of being earnest

A fascinating document of her apprenticeship, charting her earnest quest for education, identity, and voice. Reborn is overwhelmingly a record of an inner landscape.

With entries dating from 1947-1963, the first instalment from Susan Sontag's diaries charts her ascension from early adolescence to her early thirties. Unabashed, though thoroughly self-reflective, Sontag's diaries reveal the inner workings of her mind, her insecurities and her passions. This compelling account of the evolution of America's greatest post-war intellectual allows us to behold the moral and political awakening of the artist and critic.

Diaries 1964-1980

As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh

Regarding the Pain of Others

Regarding the Pain of Others is Susan Sontag's searing analysis of our numbed response to images of horror. 
 
'A coruscating sermon on how we picture suffering' The New York Times 
 
What is the purpose of images of pain and suffering? Can there be any real justification for the creation, and consumption, of such images? 
 
In this seminal volume, Susan Sontag examines the uses and meanings of images, from inspiring dissent to fostering violence to creating apathy. And through this lens she considers the nature of war, the limits of sympathy, and the obligations of conscience. 
 
'A far-reaching set of ruminations [...] on what it means to be alive and alert in the twenty-first century' Independent 
 
'Sontag is on top form: devastating' Los Angeles Times 
 
'Simple, elegant, fiercely persuasive' Metro

From Goya's Disasters of War to news footage and photographs of the conflicts in Vietnam, Rwanda and Bosnia, pictures have been charged with inspiring dissent, fostering violence or instilling apathy in us, the viewer. Regarding the Pain of Others will alter our thinking not only about the uses and meanings of images, but about the nature of war, the limits of sympathy, and the obligations of conscience.

On Photography

'The most original and illuminating study of the subject' New Yorker 
 
Photographs are everywhere. From high art to family albums to legal evidence, they capture and document the world around us. And whether we use them to expose, reveal or remember, they hold an enduring power. 
 
In this essential and revelatory volume, Susan Sontag confronts important questions surrounding the power dynamics between photographer and subject, the blurred boundary between lived events and recreated images, and the desires that lead us to record our lives. 
 
'Complex and contradictory... one of America's greatest public intellectuals' Observer 
 
'Susan Sontag offers enough food for thought to satisfy the most intellectual of appetites' The Times 
 
'A brilliant analysis of the profound changes photographic images have had in our way of looking at the world, and at ourselves, over the years' Washington Post

First published in 1973, this is a study of the force of photographic images which are continually inserted between experience and reality. Sontag develops further the concept of 'transparency'. When anything can be photographed and photography has destroyed the boundaries and definitions of art, a viewer can approach a photograph freely with no expectations of discovering what it means. This collection of six lucid and invigorating essays, the most famous being "In Plato's Cave," make up a deep exploration of how the image has affected society.

Notes on Camp

'The ultimate Camp statement: it's good because it's awful.' 
 
These two classic essays were the first works of criticism to break down the boundaries between 'high' and 'low' culture, and made Susan Sontag a literary sensation. 
 
Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

Death Kit

<a href="https://shop.penguin.co.uk/collections/book-bundles-modern-classics/?&amp;utm_source=Penguin.co.uk&amp;utm_medium=Linked_text&amp;utm_campaign=Penguin_Modern_Classics_Series_26_06">Choose 3 timeless classics for only £21 over on the Penguin Shop</a>

First published in 1967, Death Kit is a classic of modern fiction. Blending realism and dream, Susan Sontag's second novel offers a passionate exploration of the recesses of the American conscience. 
 
The novel is a narrative of the suffering of Dalton 'Diddy' Harron, told through his own observations. He works in advertising for a microscope manufacturer, is thirty-three and divorced and a month ago tried to commit suicide. The haphazard events of his life, including killing a railway worker and falling in love with a blind girl, are brought to us through the lens of Diddy's own mind. We follow him through his journey to justify his actions and exorcise his inner demons, but we can see what is happening to Diddy only from inside his head, in the present, and the balance of his mind does not always bear close scrutiny.

Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors

Sontag wrote Illness as Metaphor in 1978, while suffering from breast cancer herself. In her study she reveals that the metaphors and myths surrounding certain illnesses, especially cancer, add greatly to the suffering of the patients and often inhibit them from seeking proper treatment. By demystifying the fantasies surrounding cancer, Sontag shows cancer for what it is - a disease; not a curse, not a punishment, certainly not an embarrassment, and highly curable, if good treatment is found early enough. Almost a decade later, with the outbreak of a new, stigmatized disease replete with mystifications and punitive metaphors, Sontag wrote Aids and Its Metaphors, extending the argument of the earlier book to the AIDS pandemic.

Styles of Radical Will

This collection of essays contains some of the most important pieces of criticism of the twentieth century, including the classics 'The Aesthetics of Silence', a brilliant account of language, thought and consciousness, and 'Trip to Hanoi', written during the Vietnam War. Here too is an excoriating account of America's identity and future, a robust and surprising discussion of pornography and other richly rewarding writings on art, film, literature and politics.

Against Interpretation and Other Essays

A series of provocative discussions on everything from individual authors to contemporary religious thinking, Against Interpretation and Other Essays is the definitive collection of Susan Sontag's best known and important works published in Penguin Modern Classics. 
 
Against Interpretation was Susan Sontag's first collection of essays and made her name as one of the most incisive thinkers of our time. Sontag was among the first critics to write about the intersection between 'high' and 'low' art forms, and to give them equal value as valid topics, shown here in her epoch-making pieces 'Notes on Camp' and 'Against Interpretation'. Here too are impassioned discussions of Sartre, Camus, Simone Weil, Godard, Beckett, Lévi-Strauss, science-fiction movies, psychoanalysis and contemporary religious thought. Originally published in 1966, this collection has never gone out of print and has been a major influence on generations of readers, and the field of cultural criticism, ever since. 
 
Susan Sontag (1933-2004) was born in Manhattan and studied at the universities of Chicago, Harvard and Oxford. She is the author of four novels - The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover and In America, which won the 2000 US National Book Award for fiction - a collection of stories, several plays, and six books of essays, among them Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. Her books are translated into thirty-two languages. In 2001 she was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work, and in 2003 she received the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. 
 
If you enjoyed Against Interpretation and Other Essays, you might like Sontag's On Photography, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 
 
'A dazzling intellectual performance' 
Vogue 
 
'Sontag offers enough food for thought to satisfy the most intellectual of appetites' 
The Times

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 some of Sontag's best-known works, among them 'On Style', 'Notes on 'Camp'', and the titular essay 'Against Interpretation', where Sontag argues that modern cultural conditions have given way to a new critical approach to aesthetics.

Essays

Under the Sign of Saturn

Susan Sontag's third essay collection brings together her most important critical writing from 1972 to 1980. In these provocative and hugely influential works she explores some of the most controversial artists and thinkers of our time, including her now-famous polemic against Hitler's favourite film-maker, Leni Riefenstahl, and the cult of fascist art, as well as a dazzling analysis of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's Hitler, a Film from Germany. There are also highly personal and powerful explorations of death, art, language, history, the imagination and writing itself.

The Benefactor

The Benefactor is Susan Sontag's first book and first novel. It was originally published in 1963, and introduced a unique writer to the world. In the form of a memoir by a latter-day Candide named Hippolyte, The Benefactor leads us on a kind of psychic Grand Tour, in which Hippolyte's violently imaginative dream life becomes indistinguishable from his surprising experiences in the 'real world'.

In America

The story of In America is inspired by the emigration to America in 1876 of Helena Modrzejewska, Poland's most celebrated actress, accompanied by her husband, Count Karol Chlapowski, her fifteen-year-old son, Rudolf, the young journalist and future author of Quo Vadis, Henryk Sienkiewicz, and a few friends; their brief sojourn in Anaheim, California; and Modrzejewska's subsequent triumphant career on the American stage under the name Helena Modjeska.

A Romance

The Volcano Lover

A historical romance, Sontag's book is based on the lives of Sir William Hamilton, his wife, Emma, and Lord Nelson in the final decades of the eighteenth century. Passionately examining the shape of Western civilization since the Age of Enlightenment, Sontag's novel is an exquisitely detailed picture of revolution, the fate of nature, art and love.

Where the Stress Falls

Where the Stress Falls is divided into three sections: the first, 'Reading', includes ardent pieces on writers from Sontag's 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 theatre. 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.

'The most original and illuminating study of the subject' New Yorker

Susan Sontag's On Photography is a seminal and groundbreaking work on the subject. 
 
Susan Sontag's groundbreaking critique of photography asks forceful questions about the moral and aesthetic issues surrounding this art form. Photographs are everywhere, and the 'insatiability of the photographing eye' has profoundly altered our relationship with the world. Photographs have the power to shock, idealize or seduce, they create a sense of nostalgia and act as a memorial, and they can be used as evidence against us or to identify us. In these six incisive essays, Sontag examines the ways in which we use these omnipresent images to manufacture a sense of reality and authority in our lives. 
 
'Sontag offers enough food for thought to satisfy the most intellectual of appetites'The Times 
 
'A brilliant analysis of the profound changes photographic images have made in our way of looking at the world, and at ourselves'Washington Post 
 
'The most original and illuminating study of the subject'New Yorker 
 
One of America's best-known and most admired writers, Susan Sontag was also a leading commentator on contemporary culture until her death in December 2004. Her books include four novels and numerous works of non-fiction, among them Regarding the Pain of Others, On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, At the Same Time, Against Interpretation and Other Essays and Reborn: Early Diaries 1947-1963, all of which are published by Penguin. A further eight books, including the collections of essays Under the Sign of Saturn and Where the Stress Falls, and the novels The Volcano Lover and The Benefactor, are available from Penguin Modern Classics.

How do we see the world around us? The Penguin on Design series includes the works of creative thinkers whose writings on art, design and the media have changed our vision forever. 
 
Susan Sontag&rsquo;s groundbreaking critique of photography asks forceful questions about the moral and aesthetic issues surrounding this art form. Photographs are everywhere. They have the power to shock, idealize or seduce, they create a sense of nostalgia and act as a memorial, and they can be used as evidence against us or to identify us. In six incisive essays, Sontag examines the ways in which we use these omnipresent images to manufacture a sense of reality and authority in our lives.

Sontag on Film

Widely regarded as one of America's most important contemporary thinkers, Susan Sontag had a particular gift for reflecting on the meaning and influence of the visual, and On Photography became a seminal work for all those concerned with the interplay of images with the world. 
 
Now, more than thirty years after On Photography was first published, comes Sontag on Film: a collection of her writings and musings on films and cinema, gathered together here for the very first time by critic David Thomson and producer Tom Luddy. Inspired, vigorous and enlightening, the collection includes lucid discussions of the intersection between film and literature; in-depth studies of films and directors; and other such delightful and illuminating fragments as a list of Sontag's top-ten films taken from a 1982 issue of Sight and Sound. 
 
Sontag on Film is set to become a key work on the importance and significance of cinema in the modern world. 
 
Praise for Susan Sontag: 
 
'What ultimately matters about Sontag . . . is what she has defended: the life of the mind, and the necessity for reading and writing as "a way of being fully human"' Hilary Mantel, Los Angeles Times Book Review 
 
'Intellectually and imaginatively gifted to an extraordinary degree, she used her fearless intelligence to illuminate some of the deepest contradictions of contemporary life' John Gray, New Statesman 
 
'Complex and contradictory . . . one of America's greatest public intellectuals' Observer

More than thirty years after On Photography comes Sontag on Film: a collection of Sontag's writings and musings on films and cinema, gathered together for the first time by critic David Thomson and producer Tom Luddy. Inspired, vigorous and enlightening, it includes lucid discussions of the intersection between film and literature; in-depth studies of films and directors; and other such delightful and illuminating fragments as a list of Sontag's top-ten films taken from a 1982 issue of Sight and Sound. 
 
This is an indispensable addition to the literature of film, and a wonderful reminder of the greatness of the writer.

Susan Sontag

It's her clarity that can make you gasp, combined with her confidence . . . what shines through this book is the extraordinary suppleness of her mind . . . She articulated, in punchy, matter-of-fact prose, thoughts that for most of us would stay at best half-formed

On Women offers tantalizing glimmers and hints [of] what Susan Sontag would make of our current political moment . . . Sontag's stylish, idiosyncratic approach to the feminist debates and preoccupations of her era can be distilled pretty well into tangible guidance for ours

On Women demonstrates a powerful mind and equally forceful personality . . . like turning back the clock to the days of Sontag's prime

Sontag's language is urgent . . . and boldly provocative. Those previously unsure where she stood on the politics of womanhood, or found her opaque on the topic, can be in no doubt after this

A new collection of feminist essays from the influential writer, activist and critic, Susan Sontag

For the most part written in the 1970s during the height of second-wave feminism, Sontag's essays are strikingly relevant to our contemporary conversations. At times powerfully in sync and at others powerfully at odds with them, they are always characteristically original in their examinations of the 'biological division of labour', the double-standard for ageing and the dynamics of women's powerlessness and women's power. 
 
As Merve Emre writes in her introduction, 'They offer us the spectacle of a ferocious intellect setting itself to the task at hand: to articulate the politics and aesthetics of being a woman in the United States, the Americas and the world.'

Susan Sontag

Praise for On Women

It's her clarity that can make you gasp, combined with her confidence . . . what shines through this book is the extraordinary suppleness of her mind . . . She articulated, in punchy, matter-of-fact prose, thoughts ...

On Women offers tantalizing glimmers and hints [of] what Susan Sontag would make of our current political moment . . . Sontag's stylish, idiosyncratic approach to the feminist debates and preoccupations of he ...

On Women demonstrates a powerful mind and equally forceful personality . . . like turning back the clock to the days of Sontag's prime

It's her clarity that can make you gasp, combined with her confidence . . . what shines through this book is the extraordinary suppleness of her mind . . . She articulated, in punchy, matter-of-fact prose, thoughts ...

On Women offers tantalizing glimmers and hints [of] what Susan Sontag would make of our current political moment . . . Sontag's stylish, idiosyncratic approach to the feminist debates and preoccupations of he ...

On Women demonstrates a powerful mind and equally forceful personality . . . like turning back the clock to the days of Sontag's prime

It's her clarity that can make you gasp, combined with her confidence . . . what shines through this book is the extraordinary suppleness of her mind . . . She articulated, in punchy, matter-of-fact prose, thoughts ...

On Women offers tantalizing glimmers and hints [of] what Susan Sontag would make of our current political moment . . . Sontag's stylish, idiosyncratic approach to the feminist debates and preoccupations of he ...

On Women demonstrates a powerful mind and equally forceful personality . . . like turning back the clock to the days of Sontag's prime

Books by Susan Sontag

Articles featuring Susan Sontag

‘No need to sparkle’: why we should all take Virginia Woolf’s advice in 2021

Obama’s secret writing weapon: what is it about the yellow legal pad?

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter