Product details
Biographical note
Susan Sontag was born in Manhattan in 1933 and studied at the universities of Chicago, Harvard and Oxford. Her non-fiction works include On Photography, Regarding the Pain of Others and At the Same Time. She was also the author of four novels, including The Volcano Lover and In America, as well as a collection of stories and several plays. She was awarded the Jerusalem Prize, and received the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. She died in December 2004.At the time [Sontag] died, she was America’s best-known public intellectual. To my mind, she was also the most exemplary. Intellectually and imaginatively gifted to an extraordinary degree, she used her fearless intelligence to illuminate some of the deepest contradictions of contemporary life
- John Gray, New Statesman
Intense and insightful . . . some excellent and essential essays
Financial Times
Sontag’s clear thinking . . . shines like a spotlight in dark places
The Times
A formidable mind . . . America’s foremost intellectual . . . [Sontag’s] willingness to shoulder the responsibility and complicity for acts that most Americans are only too eager to condemn is the sign of a spirit open to examining any idea except compromise
Metro
[A] powerful collection . . . Sontag's brilliance as a literary critic, her keen analytical skill and her genius for the searingly apt phrase are all fiercely displayed here
Publishers Weekly
'These sixteen pieces brim over with vitality . . . every one of them opening up fresh lines of thought' John Gray, New Statesman
At the Same Time contains sixteen illuminating essays by Susan Sontag with a preface by David Rieff.
The sixteen essays represent the last pieces written by Susan Sontag in the years before her death in 2004. Reflecting on literature, photography and art, post 9/11 America and political activism, these essays encompass the themes that dominated Sontag's life and work, revealing why she remains one of the twentieth century's preeminent writers and thinkers.
'One of America's greatest public intellectuals' Observer
'Excellent and essential' Financial Times
'Reads like a greatest-hits album - a little politics, something on photography, some lit. crit. - of Sontag's passions' Daily Telegraph
'Sontag's clear thinking . . . shines like a spotlight in dark places' The Times