SUSAN SONTAG (1933-2004) was an American writer and filmmaker, professor, literary icon, and political activist.  She wrote extensively about photography, culture and media, AIDS and illness, human rights, and communism and leftist ideology.  The New York Review of Books called her "one of the most influential critics of her generation."

Her first collection, AGAINST INTERPRETATION & OTHER ESSAYS (1966), had an enormous influence in America and abroad on thinking about the arts and contemporary culture.  It includes original and provocative discussions of Sartre, Simone Weil, Godard, Beckett, science-fiction movies, psychoanalysis, and contemporary religious thinking.

ILLNESS AS METAPHOR (1978) is 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.

UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN (1981) brings together her most important critical writing from 1972 to 1980, including two long articles that belong together: the famed, polemical, whipping of Leni Riefenstahl's laundered reputation and camp cult of fascist art, and her stunning analysis of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's "Hitler, a Film from Germany".

WHERE THE STRESS FALLS (2002) collects more than forty longer and shorter pieces, including ardent pieces on writers from her own private canon (Machado de Assis, Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Borges, Tsvetaeva, and Elizabeth Hardwick) and articles on her passions for film, dance, photography, painting, opera, and theater.  Finally, Sontag explores her commitments to the work (and activism) of conscience and to the vocation of the writer.

In REGARDING THE PAIN OF OTHERS (2003), Sontag 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, to contemporary horrific images of Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Israel and Palestine, and New York City on September 11, 2001.


The following books are a mix of EPUB and PDF formats:

* AGAINST INTERPRETATION & OTHER ESSAYS (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966) -- EPUB

* ILLNESS AS METAPHOR (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1978) -- PDF

* REGARDING THE PAIN OF OTHERS (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003) -- EPUB

* UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN: Essays (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1981) -- PDF

* WHERE THE STRESS FALLS: Essays (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002) -- EPUB