susan sontag
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“A miracle is just an accident, with fancy trappings”
Happy Birthday, Susan Sontag. You would have been 80 today. Here is an entry from her collection of journals and notebooks, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh. Also, check out Rumpus contributor Wendy MacNaughton and Maria Popova’s fantastic collaborative illustration,…
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Susan Sontag on Art: Illustrated Diary Excerpts
Rumpus contributor Wendy MacNaughton has teamed up with Maria Popova (of Brain Pickings) to illustrate selected excerpts from Susan Sontag’s diaries. The artwork is available on Etsy as an 11×14 print on heavy cotton rag paper with razored edges in a limited edition of…
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Harnessed to Flesh
At Tablet, Adam Kirsch explores the recently released second volume of Susan Sontag’s journal entries, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh, which Kirsch argues “contain a human drama more fascinating than anything in her essays or her fiction.” “…The utter…
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Friendship of Letters: The Rumpus Interview with Sigrid Nunez
Essayist, novelist, and short story writer Sigrid Nunez discusses Sempre Susan, her first memoir.
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Life with Susan Sontag
In the 1970s, writer Sigrid Nunez moved in with her boyfriend and his mother. She hovered over the couple, critiqued their sex life, had an endless parade of house guests, and chided Nunez for not being more of a people-person.…
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Being Sontag’s Assistant
“Then the book was finished, or at least a completed manuscript was turned in—as I was to learn, for Susan, the book is never finished. We spent a week holed up in her apartment combing through the galleys and then…
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Work In Progress
As a reader, I love this. As a writer, I am terrified. Via the always excellent Carolyn Kellogg at Jacket Copy, Farrar, Straus and Giroux is creating a new web site, FSG Work In Progress, that presents conversations with authors…
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Literary Fashionables: The Cultural Theorist and The Sportsman
Two hallowed New York intellectuals are The Rumpus’s next set of Literary Fashionables. Susan Sontag and George Plimpton both circled the upper tiers of Manhattan’s literary society. And while exhibiting seemingly opposing aesthetics, both Sontag and Plimpton promulgated revolutionary ideas…
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Notable New York, This Week 2/8 – 2/14
This week in New York, Harper’s presents “Love: A Rebuke” with Colson Whitehead, Heidi Julavits and Sam Lipsyte, Simon Critchley in bed with Cabinet’s Brian Dillon chatting about hypochondria, Vol. 1 Brooklyn and Gignatic present the Greatest 3-Minute Rock ‘n…
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The Professor
In a new book of essays, Terry Castle rips through literary and cultural allusions at breakneck speed, citing obscure folk musicians and cult novelists in the same breath.
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Sigrid Nunez Remembers Susan Sontag
Here’s some weekend reading: Sigrid Nunez has written a beautiful memoir of Susan Sontag in the latest issue of Tin House. (The text is not available online, but I highly recommend you pick up this issue of Tin House: it’s…
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A Writerly Respect For Death
Now I realize it is a dazzling, sunny afternoon in San Francisco. People are no doubt reading books at Zeitgeist as I advised them to this morning. Children and dogs are cavorting in the parks. In fact, right now, I’m…