“These journals present the opportunity to delve deeply into the soul of Susan Sontag….Magnificent.” ―Nancy D. Kates, San Francisco Chronicle
“If Reborn is Sontag's precocious coming-to, this sequel finds her there, a somebody….She fills her journals with flinty thoughts….It's impossible to read these journals and not experience the warmer side of her ambition: her deep admiration for certain artists around her, her animating wish to encourage and promote.” ―Emily Greenhouse, The New Yorker
“A little like her criticism, her diary entries combine her interests with bright, aphoristic turns of phrase....These diaries are a reminder of the value of the work that made her great, and also mysterious---partly (and forever)---escaping from view.” ―The Economist
Susan Sontag was the author of four novels, including
The Benefactor,
Death Kit,
The Volcano Lover, and
In America, which won the 2000 National Book Award for fiction; a collection of stories,
I, etcetera; several plays, including
Alice in Bed; and nine works of essays, among then
On Photography, which won the National Books Critics Circle Award for criticism. In 2001, Sontag was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work. She died in New York City in 2004.
David Rieff is a New York-based journalist and author. During the nineteen-nineties, he covered conflicts in Africa (Rwanda, Burundi, Congo, Liberia), the Balkans (Bosnia and Kosovo), and Central Asia. Now a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, he has written extensively about Iraq, and, more recently, about Latin America. He is the author of eight books, including Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West and A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis. His memoir of his mother’s final illness, Swimming in a Sea of Death, appeared in January 2008. Based in New York City, Rieff is currently working on a book about the global food crisis.