Where the Stress Falls : Penguin Modern

Susan Sontag has said that her earliest idea of what a writer should be was someone who is interested in everything. Thirty-five years after her first collection of essays the now classic Against Interpretation our most important essayist has chosen more than forty longer and shorter pieces from the last two decades that illustrate a deeply felt kaleidoscopic array of interests passions observations and ideas. Reading offers ardent freewheeling considerations of talismanic writers from her own private canon such as Marina Tsvetaeva Randall Jarrell Roland Barthes Machado de Assis W. G. Sebald Borges and Elizabeth Hardwick. Seeing is a series of luminous and incisive encounters with film dance photography painting opera and theatre. And in the final section There and Here Sontag explores some of her own commitments: to the work (and activism) of conscience to the concreteness of historical understanding and to the vocation of the writer. Where the Stress Falls records a great American writer's urgent engagement with some of the most significant aesthetic and moral issues of the late twentieth century and provides a brilliant and clear-eyed appraisal of what is at stake in this new century in the survival of that inheritance.