susan sontag
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The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Darryl Pinckney
If your family or your people are looking over your shoulder, change your seat or push them away. Ask them to trust you with the truth.
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Sontag Syndrome
Over at Hazlitt, Alana Massey walks us through the anxiety that so often accompanies reading great thinkers, laying bare her own insecurities at the altar of famed writer and critic, Susan Sontag. When she finally does sit down to read…
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A Caricature of Incorrectness
For the New York Times, Benjamin Moser and Charles McGrath explore the works of authors who they believe have been unfairly stigmatized. While Moser analyzes why Susan Sontag’s work has become branded as “rubbish” and “archetypal,” McGrath confronts Kipling’s reputation as a…
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Saving Our Minds
At Brain Pickings, Maria Popova reviews Albert Camus’s Lyrical and Critical Essays, and suggests works by Nietzsche and Susan Sontag to read alongside Camus’s eye- and mind-opening work: If we are to save the mind we must ignore its gloomy virtues and celebrate…
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Anna March’s Reading Mixtape #10: Remember AIDS?
AIDS isn’t over, but far too many think it is. Not everyone is haunted by remembering the dying, the friends gone gaunt, the lesions appearing, the artists dropping out of sight, the funerals, the lie-filled obituaries, the terrified waits for…
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Photography and the European Refugee Crisis
At JSTOR Daily, Jon Greenaway revisits Susan Sontag’s writing on photography (specifically in On Photography and Regarding the Pain of Others) through the lens of Europe’s current refugee crisis.
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Critical, Dialectical, Skeptical, Desimplifying
Writers, Sontag believed, if they are any good at all, are obliged to try to understand the forces that shape us. They seek to give us a more truthful sense of things, a more nuanced sense of the world we…
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Treatment as Metaphor
In our daily efforts to stay healthy, to invent solutions for staving off death, have we already put ourselves in treatment for diseases yet to come? Conner Habib writes about his cancer diagnosis over at The Stranger, challenging Susan Sontag’s…
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The Fifty-Year-Old Startup
In a conversation with Joe Fassler at Salon, Robert Silvers, “co-editor or editor for every issue” of the New York Review of Books, recalls how the publication came to be born.
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All Are Bad
We’ve all read at least one: from “Against YA” to “Against Happiness,” essays that promise to dismiss entire abstract concepts using only rhetoric make for great click-bait. In The New Yorker, Ivan Kreilkamp explains why we keep overstating the case:…
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FUNNY WOMEN #120: Notes on “Camping”
It’s been 50 years since Susan Sontag published “Notes on ‘Camp.'” Now, we imagine what she might have said about Camping.
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The Partisan Review, Digitized
The Partisan Review, printed from 1934 to 2004, marked 69 years of cultural history in the US, with notable contributors such as Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett, Allen Ginsberg, Franz Kafka, Doris Lessing, George Orwell, Marge Piercy, Jean-Paul Sartre,…