Buy this book on-line

Sontag, Susan : Where The Stress Falls: Collected Essays

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York City, NY, 2001

ISBN 0374289174

First Edition / First Printing. Fine in Fine Dust Jacket. 288 pages. 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. "Autographed Copy" round sticker pasted in front. 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 unique 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. "Sontag combined a passion for new ways of seeing with a fidelity to Classical values (truth, beauty, decency), and thus built a bridge for us, showed us how to cross over into the modern" (The New Yorker Magazine). 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 truly 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 pundit-"thinkers" would reject and 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 acute intelligence. "Thinking is a form of feeling; feeling is a form of thinking" (Susan Sontag). An absolute "must-have" title for Susan Sontag collectors. This Autographed Copy is very prominently, neatly, and beautifully signed in black ink-pen on the half-title page by Susan Sontag. It is signed directly on the page itself, not on a tipped-in page. This title is a great book. This is one of few such signed copies of the First Hardcover Edition/First Printing still available online and is in especially fine condition: Clean, crisp, and bright, a pristine beauty. 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 collectible copy. (SEE ALSO OTHER SUSAN SONTAG TITLES IN OUR CATALOG). ISBN 0374289174.

1
1

Bibliophile Bookbase for antiquarian books, maps and prints.