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Sontag: Her Life and Work Audiobook
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Publisher Description
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.
No writer is as emblematic of the American twentieth century as Susan Sontag. 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 and Freudianism and Communism and Americanism, that forms an indispensable key to modern culture. She was there when the Cuban Revolution began, and when the Berlin Wall came down; in Vietnam under American bombardment, in wartime Israel, in besieged Sarajevo. She was in New York when artists tried to resist the tug of money—and when many gave in. No writer negotiated as many worlds; no serious writer had as many glamorous lovers. Sontag tells these stories and examines the work upon which her reputation was based. It explores the agonizing insecurity behind the formidable public face: the broken relationships, the struggles with her sexuality, that animated—and undermined—her writing. And it shows her attempts to respond to the cruelties and absurdities of a country that had lost its way, and her conviction that fidelity to high culture was an activism of its own.
Utilizing hundreds of interviews conducted from Maui to Stockholm and from London to Sarajevo—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.Download and start listening now!
“Moser’s accomplishment here is breathtaking: it includes an extraordinary knowledge of the subject, her milieu, her writings, her ideas, and her friends and family, beautiful prose, extraordinary insights, a capacity to understand her driven emotional life and her stellar intellectual life.”
— Rebecca Solnit, author of Call Them By Their True Names
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“A deep and thorough portrait of the intellectual giant that’s both dishy and enlightening.”
— Washington Post -
“A landmark biography, the first major reintroduction of an incomparable literary heavyweight to the public since her death.”
— New York Times -
“This biography keeps her defiantly alive: argumentative, willful, often right, always interesting, encouraging us to up our game as we watch her at the top of hers.”
— The Guardian (London) -
“An epiphany of research and storytelling, the definitive life of a writer both more and less than the myth she fastidiously crafted.”
— Minneapolis Star Tribune -
“A landmark achievement—astonishing in its scope, brilliant in its perceptiveness, and a joy to read.”
— Jewish Book Council -
“An astonishing page-turner, the last word on Susan Sontag.”
— Sigrid Nunez, National Book Award-winning author -
“Sontag’s influence on aesthetics, writing, and the wider culture is almost impossible to overstate…She stands reclaimed for our century in this definitive, fiercely intelligent work.”
— Stephen Fry, New York Times bestselling author -
“Moser brings his iconic subject to life in this gripping, insightful, and supremely stylish biography…revealing at every turn the vital, complicated, imperfect human being behind the formidable public intellectual.”
— Edmund Gordon, author of The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography
Awards
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A Washington Post Pick for September
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Longlisted for the 2020 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography
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An O Magazine Best Book of the Year
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A New York Times Pick of the Month
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Winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Biography
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About Benjamin Moser
Benjamin Moser is the author of several books, including Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book. For his work bringing Clarice Lispector to international prominence, he received Brazil’s first State Prize for Cultural Diplomacy. A former books columnist for Harper’s Magazine and the New York Times Book Review, he has also written for the New Yorker, Conde Nast Traveler, and the New York Review of Books.
About Tavia Gilbert
Tavia Gilbert is an acclaimed narrator of more than four hundred full-cast and multivoice audiobooks for virtually every publisher in the industry. Named the 2018 Voice of Choice by Booklist magazine, she is also winner of the prestigious Audie Award for best narration. She has earned numerous Earphones Awards, a Voice Arts Award, and a Listen-Up Award. Audible.com has named her a Genre-Defining Narrator: Master of Memoir. In addition to voice acting, she is an accomplished producer, singer, and theater actor. She is also a producer, singer, photographer, and a writer, as well as the cofounder of a feminist publishing company, Animal Mineral.