Susan Sontag Books in Order

Hippolyte recounts a life in which vivid dreams increasingly blur with waking experience. Presented as his memoir, the novel follows a strange inward journey that unsettles the boundary between an imaginative private world and the reality around him.

Susan Sontag examines literature, cinema, theater, and contemporary thought while challenging conventional distinctions between serious and popular art. These essays argue for renewed attention to style and direct experience, questioning habits of interpretation that can obscure a work's impact.

After a suicide attempt, divorced advertising worker Diddy Harron tries to understand his life through encounters involving a railway worker's death and a blind woman. His account draws the reader into a troubled consciousness where perception and reality become uncertain.

A revolutionary intellectual hires an earnest student to organize his papers, drawing the young man and his girlfriend into an unsettling household. The older couple's manipulations blur political conviction, desire, and self-interest in Sontag's original screenplay.

These essays examine silence, pornography, film, literature, and American politics as expressions of radical thought. Moving from aesthetic questions to Sontag's experience in wartime Hanoi, the collection explores the relationship between artistic experimentation, consciousness, and political responsibility.

Sontag's screenplay uses uneasy conversations, silences, and a brooding Scandinavian setting to explore troubled relationships. Reworking familiar traditions of northern European cinema, it considers the fragile forms of consolation available to its characters.

Susan Sontag examines how myths and metaphors surrounding cancer intensify patients' suffering. Drawing on her experience of illness, she challenges the idea that disease reveals character or deserves blame, arguing for an understanding freed from punitive cultural meanings.

Essays written between 1972 and 1980 explore artists and thinkers whose work unsettles accepted ideas about culture. Sontag considers fascist aesthetics, film, language, death, and imagination, connecting close criticism with questions about history and moral responsibility.

Susan Sontag selects essays, fiction and other writing that trace the development of her ideas and literary interests. The collection brings her criticism and imaginative work together, with an interview and reflections on Roland Barthes.

Susan Sontag extends her critique of illness metaphors to the AIDS epidemic. She examines how fear, stigma, and punitive language turn a disease into a moral judgment, complicating the lives of people already facing illness.

In late-eighteenth-century Europe, the lives of collector Sir William Hamilton, his wife Emma, and Lord Nelson become entangled through love and desire. Their story unfolds amid revolution, linking private passions with the period's changing ideas about art and civilization.

This play imagines a meeting between the life of Alice James and the world of Alice in Wonderland. Through its dramatic fantasy, Sontag explores women's grief, anger, and confinement, alongside the liberating possibilities and limits of imagination.

In 1876, celebrated Polish actress Maryna Zalezowska leads a group to California in search of a communal ideal. When the experiment fails, she pursues an American stage career, confronting the possibilities and costs of reinventing herself.

Susan Sontag moves between favorite writers, the visual and performing arts, and the responsibilities of intellectual life. Essays on reading, seeing, and political commitment examine how artistic experience and the work of conscience shape one another.

Sixteen late essays bring together Susan Sontag's reflections on literature, photography, art, and political responsibility. Written before her death in 2004, they confront post-September 11 America while returning to the creative and ethical questions that shaped her life.

Diaries from Susan Sontag's adolescence through her early thirties trace the formation of her intellectual and artistic identity. Private reflections reveal her insecurities, ambitions, relationships, and growing moral and political awareness as she deliberately shapes a life in writing.

Susan Sontag's journals and notebooks trace her intellectual, artistic, and political life from 1964 to 1980. Reflections on filmmaking, travel, reading, and personal experience expose the private questions and commitments behind her public work during turbulent years.

This collection gathers Susan Sontag's writing on cinema, including discussions of directors, particular films, and the relationship between literature and the screen. Shorter reflections and personal selections reveal the range of her engagement with moving images.

Eleven stories gather Susan Sontag’s shorter fiction across her career. Experimental narratives explore identity, memory, illness and human connection, ranging from a young admirer’s encounter with Thomas Mann to friends responding to the AIDS crisis.

Seven essays and exchanges explore women's aging, beauty, sexuality, liberation, and power. Writing amid second-wave feminism, Susan Sontag questions social assumptions and political orthodoxies, examining how gender intersects with class, cultural representation, and the expectations imposed on women's lives.