The definitive portrait of one of the twentieth century's most towering figures- her writing and her radical thought, her public activism and her private face.
Benjamin Moser is the author of Why This World- A Biography of Clarice Lispector, a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award and his work bringing Clarice Lispector to international prominence was recognized with Brazil's State Prize for Cultural Diplomacy. He has published translations from several languages, received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and worked as a books columnist for Harper's Magazine and The New York Times Book Review. He lives in the Netherlands and France.
Moser intelligently brings together both public and private,
onstage and off-. His scrutiny of her essays, fiction, films, and
political activism is clear-eyed, his analysis of her tumultuous
affective life sympathetic... Sontag offers a thoroughly researched
chronicle of an unparalleled American figure and the institutions
tied to her... deft and sometimes dishy
*Bookforum*
Moser does rather a brilliant job...we have Sontag as daughter,
friend, lover, wife and mother, but Moser's writing is
appropriately bold and anecdotal, so there is less the feeling of
years accrued than of selves tried out. He's an essayist, taking on
an essayist, and his best passages are biographical readings of her
writing. His assessment of her novels is punchy and
insightful...this biography keeps her defiantly alive:
argumentative, wilful, often right, always interesting, encouraging
us to up our game as we watch her at the top of hers
*The Guardian*
Moser is good at elucidating Sontag's ideas and putting into
context the fecundity of her thought. He discusses her "Olympian"
sex life with sympathy and insight - her galaxy of lovers included
Bobby Kennedy, Jasper Johns, Warren Beatty and Annie Leibovitz -
and is unbiased when it comes to evaluating her writing
*The Sunday Times*
Moser's socially panoramic, psychologically incisive biography does
a superb job of charting Sontag's self-invention
*The Guardian*
There can be no doubting the brilliance - the sheer explanatory
vigour - of Moser's biography... a triumph of the virtues of
seriousness and truth-telling that Susan Sontag espoused again and
again but was conspicuously and often quite consciously unable to
force herself to live by.
*The New Statesman*
Moser has had the confidence and erudition to bring all of
[Sontag's] contradictory aspects together in a biography fully
commensurate with the scale of his subject. He is...a gifted,
compassionate writer.
*The TLS*
A portrait of the intellectual conscience of the babyboomer
generation - faults and all
*The Financial Times*
sensational...provides an indelible portrait of a personality, a
career and various milieu
*Books of the Year, New Statesman*
evocative and entertaining...Moser renders Sontag's ascent to
intellectual stardom as a rich and often rollicking affair
*The Best Books of 2019, Oprah Magazine*
An exhausting biography about an exhausting woman that will keep
you up nights greedily reading all 800 pages until you pass out
exhausted yourself - exhilarated and amazed at this difficult,
brilliant but clueless writer's life.
*The Amazon Book Review*
a monumental work that reveals the flawed private person behind the
ferocious intellectual public persona
*FT Essential Reads of 2019*
Benjamin Moser's accomplishment here is breathtaking: it includes
an extraordinary knowledge of the subject, her milieu, her
writings, her ideas, and her friends and family, beautiful prose,
extraordinary insights, a capacity to understand her driven
emotional life and her stellar intellectual life. It will be called
unsparing, because some of its truths about this complex figure are
harsh, but it is generous to the subject as well as to readers who
want to understand this woman who stood so tall and cast such a
long shadow across twentieth-century intellectual life.
*Rebecca Solnit*
I always found Susan Sontag in turns brilliant, vain, wise,
foolish, high, low, dazzlingly insightful, pretentious, pure ...
but always fiercely and frighteningly intelligent, learned, alert
and aware. Benjamin Moser's monumental biography reveals the
surprisingly tender, insecure, simple and intellectually dedicated
story of one the most remarkable literary figures to emerge in
twentieth century America. Her influence on aesthetics, writing and
the wider culture is almost impossible to overstate and Moser's own
fierce intelligence weaves between the life and the work quite
magnificently. She stands reclaimed for our century, a much more
lovable and variegated character than I ever guessed. Definitive
and delightful
*Stephen Fry*
Susan Sontag made and broke the mold of American 20th century
public intellectual. Fifteen years after her death, her ethos of
'high seriousness' seems quaint and dated. In this long-awaited,
brilliant biography, Benjamin Moser show us how to read Sontag -
and, by extension, her times - in the present, and reveals the
extents and limits of her genius. His psychologically nuanced
critical study is written with sang-froid and compassion.
*Chris Kraus*
Benjamin Moser brings his iconic subject to life in this gripping,
insightful and supremely stylish biography. He makes a modern epic
out of Sontag's remarkable story, from her tortured relationship
with her alcoholic mother to her unflinching visits to besieged
Sarajevo, revealing at every turn the vital, complicated, imperfect
human being behind the formidable public intellectual.
*Edmund Gordon*
An astonishing page-turner, like a brilliant suspense novel (even
for one who knew what happened next). The Sue/Susan/Sontag/"Susan
Sontag" character emerges here in all her wonderfulness and
terribleness and staggering complexity. This is it: the last word
on Susan Sontag. I can't imagine the necessity of another book
about her life
*Sigrid Nunez*
If it's already difficult to imagine American culture without Susan
Sontag's contributions to it, it may soon become difficult to
imagine her life without Benjamin Moser's account of it. A
significant life like Sontag's demands a significant biography.
That demand has now been incisively, extravagantly met
*Michael Cunningham*
Don't be fooled by the length. This book, at more than 800 pages,
is compulsive reading: moving, maddening, ridiculous and beautiful
scenes from the life of Susan Sontag, and the epochs she traversed.
Moser has a true and deep love for his subject, a love unafraid to
be truthful, and it shows.
*Rachel Kushner*
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