Susan Sontag Books In Order
Book links take you to Amazon. As an Amazon Associate I earn money from qualifying purchases.Publication Order of Standalone Novels
The Benefactor | (1963) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Death Kit | (1967) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Volcano Lover | (1992) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
In America | (2000) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Publication Order of Plays
Duet for Cannibals | (1970) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Brother Carl | (1974) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Alice in Bed | (1993) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Publication Order of Collections
I, etcetera | (1963) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
A Susan Sontag Reader | (1982) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Debriefing | (2017) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
On Women | (2023) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Publication Order of Journals of Susan Sontag Books
Reborn | (2008) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh | (2012) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
Notes on | (1964) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Against Interpretation | (1966) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Trip to Hanoi | (1968) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Styles of Radical Will | (1969) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Art of Revolution | (1970) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
On Photography | (1973) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Illness as Metaphor | (1978) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Under the Sign of Saturn | (1980) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
AIDS and Its Metaphors | (1989) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Dancers on a Plane | (1989) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Where the Stress Falls | (2001) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Regarding the Pain of Others | (2003) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
At the Same Time | (2007) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Sontag on Film | (2012) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Essays of the 1960s & 70s | (2013) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Later Essays | (2017) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Susan Sontag on Women | (2023) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Susan Sontag On Film /anglais | (2099) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Publication Order of Best American Short Stories Books
The Best Short Stories of 1915 | (1916) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best Short Stories of 1916 | (1916) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best Short Stories of 1917 | (1917) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best Short Stories of 1918 | (1918) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best Short Stories of 1919 | (1919) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best Short Stories of 1921 | (1921) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best Short Stories of 1922 | (1922) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best Short Stories of 1923 | (1923) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best Short Stories 1924 | (1924) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best Short Stories of 1925 | (1925) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best Short Stories 1926 | (1926) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best Short Stories 1927 | (1927) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best Short Stories of 1928 | (1928) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best Short Stories of 1929 | (1929) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best Short Stories 1930 | (1930) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best Short Stories 1931 | (1931) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best Short Stories of 1932 | (1932) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best Short Stories 1933 | (1933) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best Short Stories 1934 | (1934) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best Short Stories 1935 | (1935) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best Short Stories 1936 | (1936) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best Short Stories 1937 | (1937) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best Short Stories of 1938 | (1938) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
50 Best American Short Stories, 1915-1939 | (1939) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best Short Stories 1939 | (1939) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best Short Stories of 1940 | (1940) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best Short Stories 1941 | (1941) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 1942 | (1942) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 1943 | (1943) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 1944 | (1944) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 1945 | (1945) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 1946 | (1946) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 1948 | (1948) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 1949 | (1949) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 1950 | (1950) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 1951 | (1951) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 1952 | (1952) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 1953 | (1953) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 1955 | (1955) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 1956 | (1956) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 1957 | (1957) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 1958 | (1958) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 1959 | (1959) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 1960 | (1960) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 1961 | (1961) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 1962 | (1962) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 1963 | (1963) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 1965 | (1965) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 1966 | (1966) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 1967 | (1967) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 1968 | (1967) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories of 1969 | (1969) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 1970 | (1970) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 1971 | (1971) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 1972 | (1972) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 1973 | (1973) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 1974 | (1974) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best of Best American Short Stories 1915-1950 | (1975) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 1975 | (1975) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 1976 | (1976) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 1977 | (1977) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 1978 | (1978) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 1979 | (1979) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 1980 | (1980) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 1981 | (1981) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 1983 | (1983) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 1984 | (1984) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 1985 | (1985) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 1987 | (1987) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories of the Eighties | (1990) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 1990 | (1990) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 1991 | (1991) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 1992 | (1992) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 1996 | (1996) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 1997 | (1997) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 1998 | (1998) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 1999 | (1999) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 2000 | (2000) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 2001 | (2001) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 2002 | (2002) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 2003 | (2003) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 2004 | (2004) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 2005 | (2005) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best Short Stories of 1921, and the Yearbook of the American Short Story | (2007) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories1921 | (2007) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 2009 | (2009) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 2015 | (2015) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
100 Years of The Best American Short Stories | (2015) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 2017 | (2017) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 2018 | (2018) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories 2020 | (2020) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Anthology series. |
Publication Order of Anthologies
The Best American Essays 1992 | (1992) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction | (1999) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Robert Bresson | (1999) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Good Parts: The Best Erotic Writing in Modern Fiction | (2000) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Wonderful Town | (2000) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best American Short Stories of the Century | (2000) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Writers on Writing: Collected Essays from The New York Times | (2001) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag was born in New York City on January 16, 1933 as Susan Rosenblatt, the daughter of Jack and Mildred Rosenblatt, both of whom were Jews of Polish and Lithuanian descent.
Her dad managed a fur trading business in China, where he died of tuberculosis in 1939, when Susan was just five years old. Seven years later, her mom remarried to US Army Captain Nathan Sontag. Both Susan and Judith (her sister) took their stepdad’s surname, even though he didn’t adopt them formally. She didn’t have a religious upbringing and said she hadn’t entered into a synagogue until her mid-twenties.
Susan was active in speaking and writing about, or traveling to, areas of conflict, including during the Siege of Sarajevo and the Vietnam War. She wrote extensively about culture and media, photography, illness and AIDS, leftist ideology, and human rights. Her speeches and essays drew controversy, and she’s been described as being one of the most influential critics of her generation.
Susan had a rather unhappy childhood, with a distant and cold mom who was constantly away. She lived on Long Island, New York, then in Tucson, Arizona, and later in the San Fernando Valley in southern California, where she took refuge in books and wound up graduating from North Hollywood High School when she was just fifteen years old.
She started her undergraduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, but transferred to the University of Chicago in admiration of the school’s prominent core curriculum. While at Chicago, she undertook studies in ancient history, philosophy, and literature alongside some of her other requirements. At the age of eighteen, she graduated with an AB and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. While she was at Chicago, she became friends with film director Mike Nichols, a fellow student. For the first time, her work appeared in print in 1951 in the Chicago Review’s winter issue.
She married Philip Rieff at the age of 17, and they stayed together from 1950 until 1959 to, they had a son, named David Rieff. He went to be his mom’s editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, as well as a writer in his own right.
While she studied at Chicago, she went to a summer school taught by Hans Heinrich Gerth, the sociologist, who became a friend and later influenced her study of German thinkers. Susan, upon finishing her Chicago degree taught freshman English at the University of Connecticut during the 1952-53 year.
Then she went to Harvard University for grad school, initially studying literature with Harry Levin and Perry Miller before moving on to theology and philosophy.
Susan was awarded an American Association of University Woman’s fellowship for the 1957-58 academic year to St. Anne’s College, Oxford, where she traveled without her son and husband. There, she had classes with A. J. Ayer, Iris Murdoch, H. L. A. Hart, and Stuart Hampshire, while also going to the B. Phil seminars of J. L. Austin and lectures of Isaiah Berlin.
Oxford didn’t appeal to her, though and she transferred after Micaelmas term of ‘57 to the University of Paris. While in Paris, she socialized with expat artists and academics including Harriet Sohmers, Allan Bloom, Jean Wahl, Alfred Chester, and Maria Irene Fornes.
She remarked that her time in Paris was possibly the most important period of her whole life. It provided the basis of her long artistic and intellectual association with the culture of France. She would also move to New York in 1959 in order to live with Fornes for the next seven years, regain custody of her son, and teaching at different universities as her literary reputation grew.
As she worked on her stories, she taught at Sarah Lawrence College and City University of New York and the Philosophy of Religion from 1960 to 1964 in Colombia University’s Religion Department. Susan held a writing fellowship at Rutgers University for a year before she ended her relationship with academia in favor of focusing on freelance writing full time.
Susan became aware of her bisexuality during her early teen years. At the age of fifteen she wrote of feeling she had lesbian tendencies. And at sixteen she had this sexual encounter with a woman. She lived with this woman, Harriet Sohmers Zwerling (model and writer), from 1958-1959.
She also had a close relationship with Annie Leibovitz, after meeting in the year 1989, when both had established a notability in their careers already. They were together until Susan’s death.
She died at the age of 71 in New York City on December 28, 2004 from complications of myelodysplastic syndrome which had evolved into acute myelogenous leukemia.
“The Benefactor” is the first stand alone novel and was released in 1963. Introducing a new and unique writer to the world, in the form of a memoir by a latter day Candide called Hippolyte. The novel leads us on a sort of psychic Grand Tour, in which Hippolyte’s violent imaginative dream life gets indistinguishable from his surprising experiences in the ‘real world’.
Susan’s book supplies this acerbic, fascinating, and knowing portrait of a certain bohemian demimonde which flourished in France. This is, more importantly, a novel about ideas (particularly religious ideas), unlike any other: disturbing, funny, profound, and acrobatic.
“In America” is a stand alone novel and was released in 1999. In the year 1876, this group of Poles, led by Maryna Zalewska, Poland’s greatest actress, travel to California in order to found a “utopian” commune. Maryna, who has entirely renounced her career, is accompanied by her young son and husband, and in her entourage is a rising young writer that’s in love with her. The novel depicts the West that is still empty primarily, where white settlers confront Asian coolies and native Californians.
The image of California and of America (as escape, as fantasy, and as radical simplification) constantly meets a much more complex reality. The commune fails and the majority of the emigres head back home, however Maryna remains and triumphs on the American stage.
This is a juicy, big, and surprising novel, about one woman’s search for self-transformation, about the fate of idealism, about the theater world, which will captivate readers right from the first page.
Winner of the 2000 National Book Award for Fiction.
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