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Against Interpretation and Other Essays
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How does the spectacle of the sufferings of others affect us? Are viewers inured - or incited - to violence by the depiction of cruelty? Susan Sontag here takes a fresh look at the representation of atrocity - from Goya's The Disasters of War to photographs of the American Civil War, lynchings of blacks in the South, and the Nazi death camps, and to more contemporary horrific images of Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Israel, and Palestine, as well as New York City on September 11, 2001.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Terrible recording
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Styles of Radical Will
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Styles of Radical Will, Susan Sontag's second collection of essays, extends the investigations she undertook in Against Interpretation with essays on film, literature, politics, and a groundbreaking study of pornography.
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On Photography
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First published in 1973, this is a study of the force of photographic images, which are continually inserted between experience and reality. When anything can be photographed, and photography has destroyed the boundaries and definitions of art, a viewer can approach a photograph freely, with no expectations of discovering what it means. This collection of six lucid and invigorating essays, with the most famous being "In Plato's Cave", make up a deep exploration of how the image has affected society.
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Mythologies
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When Roland Barthes's groundbreaking Mythologies first appeared in English in 1972, it was immediately recognized as one of the most significant works in French theory - yet nearly half of the essays from the original work were missing. This new edition of Mythologies is the first complete, authoritative English version of the French classic. It includes the brilliant "Astrology", never published in English before.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Fun and engaging
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Under the Sign of Saturn
- Essays
- By: Susan Sontag
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 2
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Sontag's most important critical writings from 1972 to 1980 are collected in Under the Sign of Saturn. One of America's leading essayists, Sontag's writings are commentaries on the relation between moral and aesthetic ideas, discussing the works of Antonin Artaud, Leni Riefenstahl, Elias Canetti, Walter Benjamin, and others. The collection includes a variety of her well-known essays. Sontag's writings are famously full of intellectual range and depth, and are at turns exhilarating, ominous, disturbing, and beautiful.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great essays and a great reading performance
- By Jaded Buddha on 03-29-18
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The Argonauts
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 810
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 716
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Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of "autotheory" offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. At its center is a romance: the story of the author's relationship with the artist Harry Dodge. This story, which includes Nelson's account of falling in love with Dodge, who is fluidly gendered, as well as her journey to and through a pregnancy, is an intimate portrayal of the complexities and joys of (queer) family making.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Mixed Feelings. Strange Book
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Regarding the Pain of Others
- By: Susan Sontag
- Narrated by: Jennifer Van Dyck
- Length: 2 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 155
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 133
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 135
How does the spectacle of the sufferings of others affect us? Are viewers inured - or incited - to violence by the depiction of cruelty? Susan Sontag here takes a fresh look at the representation of atrocity - from Goya's The Disasters of War to photographs of the American Civil War, lynchings of blacks in the South, and the Nazi death camps, and to more contemporary horrific images of Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Israel, and Palestine, as well as New York City on September 11, 2001.
-
2 out of 5 stars
-
Terrible recording
- By Vandra on 02-16-12
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Styles of Radical Will
- By: Susan Sontag
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall5 out of 5 stars 1
-
Performance4 out of 5 stars 1
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 1
Styles of Radical Will, Susan Sontag's second collection of essays, extends the investigations she undertook in Against Interpretation with essays on film, literature, politics, and a groundbreaking study of pornography.
-
On Photography
- By: Susan Sontag
- Narrated by: Jennifer Van Dyck
- Length: 6 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 183
-
Performance4 out of 5 stars 160
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 157
First published in 1973, this is a study of the force of photographic images, which are continually inserted between experience and reality. When anything can be photographed, and photography has destroyed the boundaries and definitions of art, a viewer can approach a photograph freely, with no expectations of discovering what it means. This collection of six lucid and invigorating essays, with the most famous being "In Plato's Cave", make up a deep exploration of how the image has affected society.
-
4 out of 5 stars
-
I'm Glad I Bought, Despite Some Negative Reviews
- By Deb on 10-18-13
-
Mythologies
- The Complete Edition, in a New Translation
- By: Roland Barthes, Richard Howard (translator), Annette Lavers (translator)
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 9 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 94
-
Performance4 out of 5 stars 81
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 80
When Roland Barthes's groundbreaking Mythologies first appeared in English in 1972, it was immediately recognized as one of the most significant works in French theory - yet nearly half of the essays from the original work were missing. This new edition of Mythologies is the first complete, authoritative English version of the French classic. It includes the brilliant "Astrology", never published in English before.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
Fun and engaging
- By Chris Hall on 01-08-19
-
Under the Sign of Saturn
- Essays
- By: Susan Sontag
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 6 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 2
-
Performance4 out of 5 stars 2
-
Story5 out of 5 stars 2
Sontag's most important critical writings from 1972 to 1980 are collected in Under the Sign of Saturn. One of America's leading essayists, Sontag's writings are commentaries on the relation between moral and aesthetic ideas, discussing the works of Antonin Artaud, Leni Riefenstahl, Elias Canetti, Walter Benjamin, and others. The collection includes a variety of her well-known essays. Sontag's writings are famously full of intellectual range and depth, and are at turns exhilarating, ominous, disturbing, and beautiful.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
Great essays and a great reading performance
- By Jaded Buddha on 03-29-18
-
The Argonauts
- By: Maggie Nelson
- Narrated by: Maggie Nelson
- Length: 4 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 810
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 716
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 715
Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of "autotheory" offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. At its center is a romance: the story of the author's relationship with the artist Harry Dodge. This story, which includes Nelson's account of falling in love with Dodge, who is fluidly gendered, as well as her journey to and through a pregnancy, is an intimate portrayal of the complexities and joys of (queer) family making.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Mixed Feelings. Strange Book
- By Sharey on 09-09-17
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Gender Trouble
- Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
- By: Judith Butler
- Narrated by: Emily Beresford
- Length: 8 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 33
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 29
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 28
One of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past 50 years, Judith Butler's Gender Trouble is as celebrated as it is controversial. Arguing that traditional feminism is wrong to look to a natural, "essential" notion of the female, or indeed of sex or gender, Butler starts by questioning the category "woman" and continues in this vein with examinations of "the masculine" and "the feminine." Best known however, but also most often misinterpreted, is Butler's concept of gender as a reiterated social performance rather than the expression of a prior reality.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Been wanting for a long time to read Gender Trouble
- By GayIsGreat on 03-22-18
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The Art of Cruelty
- A Reckoning
- By: Maggie Nelson
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 8 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 41
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 38
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 38
Today both reality and entertainment crowd our fields of vision with brutal imagery. The pervasiveness of images of torture, horror, and war has all but demolished the 20th-century hope that such imagery might shock us into a less alienated state, or aid in the creation of a just social order. What to do now? When to look, when to turn away? Genre-busting author Maggie Nelson brilliantly navigates this contemporary predicament, with an eye to the question of whether or not focusing on representations of cruelty makes us cruel.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great book!
- By Amazon Customer on 07-20-17
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The Collected Schizophrenias
- Essays
- By: Esmé Weijun Wang
- Narrated by: Esmé Weijun Wang
- Length: 7 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 84
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 80
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 80
An intimate, moving book written with the immediacy and directness of one who still struggles with the effects of mental and chronic illness, The Collected Schizophrenias cuts right to the core. Schizophrenia is not a single unifying diagnosis, and Esmé Weijun Wang writes not just to her fellow members of the “collected schizophrenias” but to those who wish to understand it as well.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Great Overview of Mental Health
- By Melissa on 03-07-19
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Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors
- By: Susan Sontag
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 4 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 8
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 7
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 7
In 1978 Susan Sontag wrote Illness as Metaphor, a classic work described by Newsweek as “one of the most liberating books of its time”. A cancer patient herself when she was writing the book, Sontag shows how the metaphors and myths surrounding certain illnesses, especially cancer, add greatly to the suffering of patients and often inhibit them from seeking proper treatment.
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5 out of 5 stars
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fantastic
- By andrew on 09-07-18
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As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh
- Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980
- By: Susan Sontag
- Narrated by: Jennifer Van Dyck
- Length: 13 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 17
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 17
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Story4 out of 5 stars 17
This, the second of three volumes of Susan Sontag’s journals and notebooks, begins where the first volume left off, in the middle of the 1960s. It traces and documents Sontag’s evolution from fledgling participant in the artistic and intellectual world of New York City to world-renowned critic and dominant force in the world of ideas with the publication of the groundbreaking Against Interpretation in 1966.
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Postmodernism
- A Very Short Introduction
- By: Christopher Butler
- Narrated by: Christine Williams
- Length: 4 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 84
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 74
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 72
In this Very Short Introduction Christopher Butler challenges and explores the key ideas of postmodernists, and their engagement with theory, literature, the visual arts, film, architecture, and music. He treats artists, intellectuals, critics, and social scientists 'as if they were all members of a loosely constituted and quarrelsome political party' - a party which includes such members as Cindy Sherman, Salman Rushdie, Jacques Derrida, Walter Abish, and Richard Rorty - creating a vastly entertaining framework in which to unravel the mysteries of the 'postmodern condition', from the politicizing of museum culture to the cult of the politically correct.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Extremely biased
- By Dan on 02-17-17
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Mr. Know-It-All
- The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder
- By: John Waters
- Narrated by: John Waters
- Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall0 out of 5 stars 0
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Performance0 out of 5 stars 0
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Story0 out of 5 stars 0
No one knows more about everything - especially everything rude, clever, and offensively compelling - than John Waters. The man in the pencil-thin mustache, auteur of the transgressive movie classics Pink Flamingos, Polyester, and many more, serves it up raw: how to fail upward in Hollywood; how to develop musical taste from Nervous Norvus to Maria Callas; how to build a home so ugly and trendy that no one but you would dare live in it; more important, how to tell someone you love them without emotional risk; and yes, how to cheat death itself.
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Contemporary Art
- A Very Short Introduction
- By: Julian Stallabrass
- Narrated by: James Conlan
- Length: 4 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 34
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Performance3.5 out of 5 stars 28
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 26
Contemporary art has never been so popular - but what is 'contemporary' about contemporary art? What is its role today, and who is controlling its future? Julian Stallabrass takes us inside the international art world to answer these and other controversial questions, and to argue that behind contemporary art's variety and apparent unpredictability lies a grim uniformity. Its mysteries are all too easily explained, its depths much shallower than they seem.
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5 out of 5 stars
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art historical Marxist criticism
- By Jaded Buddha on 11-12-13
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Ninth Street Women
- Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art
- By: Mary Gabriel
- Narrated by: Lisa Stathoplos
- Length: 39 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 27
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 25
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 24
Set amid the most turbulent social and political period of modern times, Ninth Street Women is the impassioned, wild, sometimes tragic, always exhilarating chronicle of five women who dared to enter the male-dominated world of 20th-century abstract painting - not as muses but as artists. From their cold-water lofts, where they worked, drank, fought, and loved, these pioneers burst open the door to the art world for themselves and countless others to come.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Detailed and riveting
- By The Art Book Club on 03-10-19
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Society of the Spectacle
- By: Guy Debord
- Narrated by: Bruce T Harvey
- Length: 3 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 45
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 39
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 37
This is the "Das Kapital" of the 20th century - an essential text, and the main theoretical work of the Situationists. Few works of political and cultural theory have been as enduringly provocative. From its publication amid the social upheavals of the 1960s up to the present, the volatile theses of this book have decisively transformed debates on the shape of modernity, capitalism, and everyday life in the 21st century. This is the original translation by Fredy Perlman, kept in print continuously for the last 50 years, keeping the flame of personal and collective autonomy alive.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Society of the Spectacle
- By Nathan on 05-15-18
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How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
- Essays
- By: Alexander Chee
- Narrated by: Daniel K. Isaac
- Length: 8 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 38
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 35
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Story5 out of 5 stars 34
How to Write an Autobiographical Novel is the author's manifesto on the entangling of life, literature, and politics, and how the lessons learned from a life spent reading and writing fiction have changed him. In these essays, he grows from student to teacher, reader to writer, and reckons with his identities as a son, a gay man, a Korean American, an artist, an activist, a lover, and a friend. He examines some of the most formative experiences of his life and the nation's history.
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The Book of Disquiet
- By: Fernando Pessoa
- Narrated by: Adam Sims
- Length: 17 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 22
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 22
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 21
Assembled from notes and jottings left unpublished at the time of the author’s death, The Book of Disquiet is a collection of aphoristic prose-poetry musings on dreams, solitude, time and memory. Credited to Pessoa’s alter ego, Bernardo Soares, who chronicles his contemplations in this so-called "factless" autobiography, the work is a journey of one man’s soul and, by extension, of all human souls that allow their minds and hearts to roam far and free.
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5 out of 5 stars
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a vitally important, and beautiful work
- By Jason Rosenblum on 04-03-19
Publisher's Summary
Against Interpretation was Susan Sontag's first collection of essays and is a modern classic.
Originally published in 1966, it has never gone out of print and has influenced generations of readers all over the world.
It includes the famous essays "Notes on Camp" and "Against Interpretation," as well as, her impassioned discussions of Sartre, Camus, Simone Weil, Godard, Beckett, Levi-Strauss, science-fiction movies, psychoanalysis, and contemporary religious thought.
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