WHERE THE STRESS FALLS: COLLECTED ESSAYS - Rare Fine Copy of The First Hardcover Edition/First Printing: With Unique Souvenir Material Signed by Susan Sontag

Sontag, Susan

ISBN 10: 0374289174 / ISBN 13: 9780374289171

Published by New York City, NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001, 2001

About this Item

1st Printing. Signed. 288 pages. Published in 2001. The author's fifth and final collection of essays. One of Susan Sontag's finest achievements. The First Hardcover Edition. Precedes and should not be confused with all other subsequent editions. Published in a small and limited first print run as a hardcover original only. The First Edition is now scarce. Presents Susan Sontag's "Where The Stress Falls: Collected Essays". The last collection of essays published in her lifetime, a personal "summing-up" of a politically abysmal yet culturally vibrant century. Gathers forty-one of the author's best essays at the turn of the 21st century, demonstrating, for the last and most poignant time, Sontag's achievement as iconic writer/intellectual: These are definitive pieces that could only have been written by her. The book is divided into three parts: "Reading", "Seeing", and "There And Here". The latter section also includes a short play and her Sarajevo Diary, both of which appear in book form for the very first time. Individually and collectively, they illuminate Sontag's lifelong engagement with literary, philosophical, and aesthetic issues (and pleasures) as well as the problematic and unresolved evolution of her political and moral convictions. In the end, Sontag's much-misunderstood aesthetics (sometimes, even by her) is also an ethics, her permanent contribution being that aesthetics is not subservient to ethics, but is its co-equal power: Aesthetics is a form of ethics; ethics is a form of aesthetics. They are two very different philosophical quests. But they are inextricably linked and inescapably affect, refer, and relate to each other, in a way that our absolutist pundits would reject or deny. When stated as such, it sounds so inherently true. In reality, it is neither obvious nor unmistakably clear "where the stress falls", and her essays illuminate our existential struggle with nuance, subtlety, and intelligence. An absolute "must-have" title for Susan Sontag collectors. This title is a great collection. This copy comes with a uniquely composed Souvenir Material that is very prominently and beautifully signed and inscribed in black ink-pen by the author: "For Tom - Susan Sontag". It is unique because Tom included an original (and lovely) photographic print of himself. This is the only copy (with Signed Souvenir Material) of the First Hardcover Edition/First Printing available online and is in especially fine condition: Clean, crisp, and bright. Please note: Copies available online have serious flaws yet are priced as though they had collectible value. This is surely an accessible and lovely alternative. A rare signed copy thus. Winner of the MacArthur Genius Grant, the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1977 for "On Photography", the National Book Award in 2000 for "In America", and the Jerusalem Prize in 2001. Shimon Peres, in awarding the Jerusalem Prize, described Sontag as "one of the world's finest writers and greatest minds". One of the most influential and important writer-intellectuals of the 20th century. A fine copy. (SEE ALSO OTHER SUSAN SONTAG TITLES IN OUR CATALOG) ISBN 0374289174.

Seller Inventory # 23754

Bibliographic Details

• Title: WHERE THE STRESS FALLS: COLLECTED ESSAYS - Rare Fine Copy of The First Hardcover Edition/First Printing: With Unique Souvenir Material Signed by Susan Sontag
• Publisher: New York City, NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001
• Publication Date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374289174
• ISBN 13: 9780374289171
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition.
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Fine
• Signed: Signed by Author

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

Susan Sontag is the author of four novels, The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover and In America; I, etcetera, a collection of stories; several plays; and five works of nonfiction, among them On Photography and Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. She lives in New York City. In 2001 she was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work.