Sontag
Benjamin Moser"...an epiphany of research and storytelling, the definitive life of a writer both more and less than the myth she fastidiously crafted...[with] many juicy revelations... Sontag strides across Sontag like a colossus..." - Hamilton Cain, The Star Tribune
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, Freudianism, 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. No writer is as emblematic of the American twentieth century as Susan Sontag.
"He sees in what she sought to hide the emotional truth of fiction — about her sexuality and also Mann’s. This complex sense of Sontag as a writer, made from who she was to herself and others, over time, strikes me as Moser’s real subject and the project of the larger book ... The resulting details are stunning in number and quality..." - Alexander Chee, The Los Angeles Times
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.