Sontag: Her Life and Work
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE
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.
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PRAISE
Finalist for Publishing Triangle’s Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir/Biography
Finalist for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award For Biography
Longlisted for the Plutarch Award for Biography
One of O Magazine’s Best Books of the Year
One of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Best Books of the Year
Seattle Times 4 Most Interesting Biographies of the Year
An Amazon Editors’ Holiday 2019 Gift Pick
One of New York Magazine’s The Best and Biggest Books to Read This Fall
One of O magazine’s 18 Must-Read Books of Fall
One of USA Today’s Five Books Not to Miss
One of Entertainment Weekly’s 20 New Books to Read in September
One of the New York Times’ 17 New Books to Watch For in September
One of the Washington Post’s Ten Books to Read this September
An Amazon Best of the Month, Biography & Memoir
One of O Magazine’s Best LGBTQ Books of the Year
One of the BBC’s Ten Books to Read this Summer
IndieBound Bestseller #29, 48
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—Rebecca Solnit
“Benjamin Moser’s monumental biography reveals the surprisingly tender, insecure, simple and intellectually dedicated story of one the most remarkable literary figures to emerge in twentieth century America. Her influence on aesthetics, writing and the wider culture is almost impossible to overstate and Moser’s own fierce intelligence weaves between the life and the work quite magnificently. Definitive and delightful.”
—Stephen Fry
“In this long-awaited, brilliant biography, Benjamin Moser show us how to read Sontag – and, by extension, her times – in the present, and reveals the extents and limits of her genius. His psychologically nuanced critical study is written with sang-froid and compassion.”
—Chris Kraus
“For both Sontag scholars and those new to her, Moser has written an illuminating and important volume.”
—Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
—Rachel Kushner
“An astonishing page-turner, like a brilliant suspense novel (even for one who knew what happened next!). The Sue/Susan/Sontag/“Susan Sontag” character emerges here in all her wonderfulness and terribleness and staggering complexity. This is it: the last word on Susan Sontag.”
—Sigrid Nunez
“If it’s already difficult to imagine American culture without Susan Sontag’s contributions to it, it may soon become difficult to imagine her life without Benjamin Moser’s account of it. A significant life like Sontag’s demands a significant biography. That demand has now been incisively, extravagantly met.”
—Michael Cunningham
“Gripping, insightful and supremely stylish biography. He makes a modern epic out of Sontag’s remarkable story.”
—Edmund Gordon
