'While the living room is fine for essays, short stories need to be written in the bedroom...'
Susan Sontag was one of the foremost public intellectuals of the twentieth century: an internationally renowned essayist, playwright, novelist, activist, and director who gave the world an immense and invaluable body of work. And throughout her writing life, she turned again and again to the form of short fiction.
Stories draws together all of Sontag's short fiction in one collection for the first time. It is an oeuvre ranging from allegory to autobiography, rich with fragments of life on the fly. Here Sontag dramatizes her private griefs and fears, letting her characters lead where they will, wrestling with problems that defied the limitations of her most famous written form, the essay. The result of this unique, lifelong project is a collection of remarkable versatility, depth and resonance.
Susan Sontag was a visionary, forever working ahead of her time, and in many ways she was always a twentieth century writer speaking to twenty-first century readers - to that new generation of readers who will hear her now. Stories is a work in that same challenging, visionary spirit, as finely calibrated as her greatest work in nonfiction - and it is an essential addition to the legacy of the inimitable Susan Sontag.
About the Author
Susan Sontag was born in Manhattan in 1933 and studied at the universities of Chicago, Harvard and Oxford. Her non-fiction works include Against Interpretation, On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, AIDS and its Metaphors and Regarding the Pain of Others. She is also the author of four novels, a collection of stories and several plays. Her books are translated into thirty-two languages. In 2001 she was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work, and in 2003 she received the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. She died in December 2004.
