Amazon.com: I, Etcetera (9780374174026): Susan Sontag: Books

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1978

In eight stories, this singular collection of short fiction written over the course of ten years explores the terrain of modern urban life. In reflective, telegraphic prose, Susan Sontag confronts the reader with exposed workings of an impassioned intellect in narratives seamed with many of the themes of her essays—the nature of knowing, our relationship with the past, and the future in an alienated present.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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In eight stories, this singular collection of short fiction written over the course of ten years explores the terrain of modern urban life. In reflective, telegraphic prose, Susan Sontag confronts the reader with exposed workings of an impassioned intellect in narratives seamed with many of the themes of her essays—the nature of knowing, our relationship with the past, and the future in an alienated present.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

"These seven stories are cerebral, clever experiments in form," said LJ's reviewer of this 1978 collection, adding that the book was "not for readers who prefer traditional storytelling." Sontag's reputation has grown steadily, so this should still find an audience. (LJ 9/15/78)
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Review

"These short stories establish Sontag's originality . . . her unique vision, her success with experiments in the form . . . Sontag makes a wonderful stew of the past, the life caught in memory and imagination, serves it all up lavishly laced with silences, and provides us with a gourmand's series of short courses."—Doris Grumbach, Los Angeles Times

"The eight stories in I, etcetera reflect a vital and restless imagination cooking away in several directions . . . There is an abundance of those startling ironies and wry, quirky jokes that make Susan Sontag so tempting to quote . . . [The Book] possesses its own kind of spirit and nerve, and it takes some magnificent chances."—Anne Tyler, The New Republic

"The book not only confronts and explores the life which is traveled rather than lives, it records a life fully lives in the face of all such doubts. No pain or horror is avoided, no occasion for despair is ducked . . . 'Debriefing,' the most moving story in the book, [is] surely a small masterpiece."—Michael Wood, The New York Review of Books

"Susan Sontag's collection of short stories is a pleasure to read—inventive, witty, intelligent . . . She embraces our language and the accumulation of our culture. She hears everything—echoes of dead rhetoric; glorious clichés that deaden our response to castles, sunsets, bays—and hears everywhere an elevation of the daily commonplace in the grand tour that must never end."—The Saturday Review

"The story 'Unguided Tour' is Miss Sontag's apotheosis as a fiction writer . . . Susan Sontag, the literary and social critic, is entirely at home in fiction, is exhilarated, even transfigured by it."—Anatole Broyard, The New York Times

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

More About the Author

› Visit Amazon's Susan Sontag Page

Susan Sontag was born in Manhattan in 1933 and studied at the universities of Chicago, Harvard and Oxford. She is the author of four novels, a collection of stories, several plays, and six books of essays, among them Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. Her books are translated into thirty-two languages. In 2001 she was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work, and in 2003 she received the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. She died in December 2004.