Susan Sontag
The Complete Rolling Stone Interview
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
The candid and far-reaching interview with the public intellectual and author of Illness as Metaphor, conducted in 1978 Paris and New York.
Over the summer and fall of 1978, Susan Sontag engaged in a series of deeply stimulating, provocative and intimate conversations with Jonathan Cott of Rolling Stone magazine. While the printed interview was extensive, it covered only a third of their twelve hours of discussion. Now, for the first time, the entire transcript of Sontag’s remarkable conversation is available in book form, accompanied by Cott’s preface and recollections.
An acclaimed author of novels and essays, a renowned cultural critic and radical anti-war activist, Sontag was at the height of her powers in the late 1970s. Her musings and observations in this interview reveal the breadth and depth of her critical intelligence and curiosities at the time. These hours of conversation offer a revelatory and indispensable look at the self-described "besotted aesthete" and "obsessed moralist."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cott (Days That I Remember: Spending Time with John Lennon and Yoko Ono), a founding contributing editor of Rolling Stone, presents the full text of an interview he conducted in 1978 with Sontag, which was excerpted in the magazine in 1979. Conducted over several months, in Paris and New York, the interview provides a compact, complex, and critical portrait of the author of Against Interpretation and On Photography, who died in 2004. Through his insightful questions, as well as in his preface and recollections, Cott shows Sontag as a force of cultural consciousness. The interview takes readers through her views on a range of subjects, including physicality and illness, rock and roll, feminism, love and relationships, sexuality, spirituality, geography, and the writer's life. Though at times, Sontag's tendency to speak "not in sentences but in measured and expansive paragraphs" makes it difficult to follow the discussion, the book will be a great resource for longtime followers of the critic and novelist, as well as for those encountering this great mind for the first time.
