Susan Sontag was born in Manhattan in 1933 and studied at the universities of Chicago, Harvard and Oxford. Her non-fiction works include Against Interpretation, On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, AIDS and its Metaphors and Regarding the Pain of Others. She is also the author of four novels, a collection of stories and several plays. Her books are translated into thirty-two languages. She died in December 2004.
It's her clarity that can make you gasp, combined with her confidence . . . what shines through this book is the extraordinary suppleness of her mind . . . She articulated, in punchy, matter-of-fact prose, thoughts that for most of us would stay at best half-formed -- Christina Patterson * Sunday Times * On Women offers tantalizing glimmers and hints [of] what Susan Sontag would make of our current political moment . . . Sontag's stylish, idiosyncratic approach to the feminist debates and preoccupations of her era can be distilled pretty well into tangible guidance for ours * The Atlantic * On Women demonstrates a powerful mind and equally forceful personality . . . like turning back the clock to the days of Sontag's prime -- Rosemary Goring * The Herald * Sontag's language is urgent . . . and boldly provocative. Those previously unsure where she stood on the politics of womanhood, or found her opaque on the topic, can be in no doubt after this * iNews *