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No writer is as emblematic of the American twentieth century as Susan Sontag. Mythologized and misunderstood, lauded and loathed, a girl from the suburbs who became a proud symbol of cosmopolitanism, Sontag left a legacy of writing on art and politics, feminism and homosexuality, celebrity and style, medicine and drugs, radicalism and Fascism and Freudianism and Communism and Americanism, that forms an indispensable key to modern culture. No writer negotiated as many worlds; no serious writer had as many glamorous lovers.
Sontag tells these stories and examines the work upon which her reputation was based. It explores the agonizing insecurity behind the formidable public face: the broken relationships, the struggles with her sexuality, that animated—and undermined—her writing.
And it shows her attempts to respond to the cruelties and absurdities of a country that had lost its way, and her conviction that fidelity to high culture was an activism of its own.
Utilizing hundreds of interviews conducted from Maui to Stockholm and from London to Sarajevo—and featuring nearly one hundred images—Sontag is the first book based on the writer’s restricted archives, and on access to many people who have never before spoken about Sontag, including Annie Leibovitz.
It is a definitive portrait—a great American novel in the form of a biography.
About Benjamin Moser: Benjamin Moser was born in Houston. He is the author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book of 2009. For his work bringing Clarice Lispector to international prominence, he received Brazil’s first State Prize for Cultural Diplomacy. He has published translations from French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch. He is a former books columnist for Harper’s Magazine and The New York Times Book Review and has written for The New Yorker, Conde Nast Traveler, and The New York Review of Books.
Sontag: Her Life and Work
by Bejamin Moser
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
for Biography
Publisher : Ecco
Illustrated edition
Language: : English
Sep 17, 2019
Hardcover
832 pages
ISBN-10 : 0062896393
ISBN-13 : 978-0062896391
$36.82
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Susan Sontag
Biography
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Susan Sontag
The definitive portrait
The definitive portrait of one of the American Century’s most towering intellectuals: her writing and her radical thought, her public activism and her hidden private face
N
o writer is as emblematic of the American twentieth century as Susan Sontag. Mythologized and misunderstood, lauded and loathed, a girl from the suburbs who became a proud symbol of cosmopolitanism, Sontag left a legacy of writing on art and politics, feminism and homosexuality, celebrity and style, medicine and drugs, radicalism and Fascism and Freudianism and Communism and Americanism, that forms an indispensable key to modern culture.
She was there when the Cuban Revolution began, and when the Berlin Wall came down; in Vietnam under American bombardment, in wartime Israel, in besieged Sarajevo. She was in New York when artists tried to resist the tug of money—and when many gave in. No writer negotiated as many worlds; no serious writer had as many glamorous lovers.
Sontag tells these stories and examines the work upon which her reputation was based. It explores the agonizing insecurity behind the formidable public face: the broken relationships, the struggles with her sexuality, that animated—and undermined—her writing. And it shows her attempts to respond to the cruelties and absurdities of a country that had lost its way, and her conviction that fidelity to high culture was an activism of its own.
Utilizing hundreds of interviews conducted from Maui to Stockholm and from London to Sarajevo—and featuring nearly one hundred images—Sontag is the first book based on the writer’s restricted archives, and on access to many people who have never before spoken about Sontag, including Annie Leibovitz. It is a definitive portrait—a great American novel in the form of a biography.
Benjamin Moser was born in Houston. He is the author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book. For his work bringing Clarice Lispector to international prominence, he received Brazil’s first State Prize for Cultural Diplomacy. He has published translations from French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch. A former books columnist for Harper’s Magazine and The New York Times Book Review, he has also written for The New Yorker, Conde Nast Traveler, and The New York Review of Books.
Sontag
Her Life and Work
By Benjamin Moser
Hardcover: 832 pages
Illustrated
Language: English
Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers
September 17, 2019
ISBN-10: 0062896393
ISBN-13: 978-0062896391
$39.99.
Benjamin Moser:
Sontag – Haar leven en werk.
Uit het Engels vertaald door
Koos Mebius en Lidwien Biekmann.
De Arbeiderspers;
816 pagina’s;
€ 49,99.
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Biography
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“Once upon a time, men, women and (secretly) children smoked.”
Following the success of Cataract, John Berger, one of the great soothsayers of seeing, joins forces again with Turkish illustrator Selcuk Demirel. This charming pictorial essay reflects on the cultural implications of smoking. A subtle and beautifully illustrated prose poem, Smoke lingers in the mind.
This charming illustrated work reflects on the cultural implications of smoking, and suggests, through a series of brilliantly inventive illustrations, that society’s attitude to smoke is both paradoxical and intolerant. It portrays a world in which smokers, banished from public places, must encounter one another as outlaws. Meanwhile, car exhausts and factory chimneys continue to pollute the atmosphere. Smoke is a beautifully illustrated prose poem that lingers in the mind.
“A cigarette is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis. The time of a cigarette is a parenthesis, and if it is shared you are both in that parenthesis. It’s like a proscenium arch for a dialogue.” – John Berger (in interview)
In contemporary English letters John Berger seems to me peerless. Not since D. H. Lawrence has there been a writer who offers such attentiveness to the sensual world with responsiveness to the imperatives of conscience.
—Susan Sontag
In his ceaselessly inventive work, Selçuk often uses parts of the body in ways that are characteristically Turkish…as if the comedy of the human condition were there in the human body, in the melancholy of anatomy.
—John Berger, on Selçuk Demirel
Smoke
by John Berger (Author)
and Selcuk Demirel (Illustrator)
Hardcover, $18.95
Available in Hardcover on May 8, 2018
ISBN10 1910749478
ISBN13 9781910749470
From Notting Hill Editions
70 pages
new books
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‘Debriefing’ collects all of Susan Sontag’s shorter fiction, a form she turned to intermittently throughout her writing life.
The book ranges from allegory to parable to autobiography and shows her wrestling with problems not assimilable to the essay, her more customary mode. Here she catches fragments of life on the fly, dramatizes her private griefs and fears, lets characters take her where they will.
The result is a collection of remarkable brilliance, versatility, and charm. Sontag’s work has typically required time for people to catch up to it. These challenging works of literary art―made more urgent by the passage of years―await a new generation of readers.
This is an invaluable record of the creative output of one of the most inquisitive and analytical thinkers of the twentieth century at the height of her power.
Susan Sontag (1933–2004) was the author of numerous works of nonfiction, including the groundbreaking collection of essays, Against Interpretation (FSG, 1966), and of four novels, including In America (FSG, 2000), which won the National Book Award. She died in New York City on December 28, 2004.
Benjamin Taylor is the author of his family memoir, The Hue and Cry at Our House, as well as Proust: The Search in the Yale Jewish Lives series; Naples Declared, a travel memoir; and the award-winning novels, Tales Out of School and The Book of Getting Even. He edited Saul Bellow: Letters and There Is Simply Too Much to Think About, Bellow’s collected nonfiction. Taylor is a past fellow and current trustee of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Susan Sontag;
Debriefing.
Collected Stories
Edited by Benjamin Taylor
Publ. Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Hardcover
$27.00
Publ.date: nov. 2017
ISBN: 9780374100759
336 Pages
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Eén van de scherpzinnigste en opvallendste hedendaagse auteurs doet na diepgaand onderzoek verslag van de laatste levensdagen van Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, Maurice Sendak en James Salter. Het levert een aantal fascinerende en uiterst originele overwegingen op over de eindigheid van het leven.
In Het uur van het violet kiest Katie Roiphe voor een onverwachte en bevrijdende benadering van een onderwerp waar niemand omheen kan. Ze gaat na hoe de laatste levensdagen waren van zes grote denkers, schrijvers en kunstenaars en hoe zij omgingen met de realiteit van de naderende dood, of, zoals T.S. Eliot het noemde: ‘het avondlijk uur dat Huiswaarts gericht is en de zeeman thuisbrengt’.
We maken kennis met Susan Sontag, die, wanneer ze voor de derde keer de strijd tegen kanker aangaat, worstelt met haar engagement met het rationele denken. Roiphe neemt ons mee naar de kamer in het ziekenhuis waar de 76-jarige John Updike, nadat hem de slechtst mogelijke diagnose is meegedeeld, een gedicht begint te schrijven. Ze schept een levendig beeld van de twee weken durende, bijna suïcidaal overmatige inspanning die culmineerde in de totale instorting van Dylan Thomas in het Chelsea Hotel. Ze schetst voor ons een moedgevend portret van Sigmund Freud die, nadat hij het door de nazi’s bezette Wenen is ontvlucht, in zijn Londense ballingschap het dwangmatige roken van sigaren voortzet waarvan hij weet dat het zijn aftakeling zal verhaasten. En ze toont ons dat Maurice Sendaks geliefde kinderboeken doordesemd zijn van het feit dat hij zijn leven lang geobsedeerd was door de dood, al was dat niet altijd evident.
Het uur van het violet staat vol met intieme en verrassende onthullingen. In de laatste daden van al deze creatieve genieën worden we geconfronteerd met moed, passie, zelfbedrog, zinloos lijden en onovertroffen toewijding. Door de laatste levensdagen van deze grote auteurs te beschrijven in indrukwekkende, niet-sentimentele termen helpt Katie Roiphe ons om de dood moedig onder ogen te zien en er minder bang voor te zijn.
Katie Roiphe
Het uur van het violet
Grote schrijvers in hun laatste dagen
Vertaald uit het Engels door Anne Jongeling
Uitg. Hollands Diep
Paperback, 352 p.
ISBN: 9789048836420
€ 19.99 – Januari 2017
# Meer informatie op website Hollands Diep
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