Book description
Reborn is the compelling and frank early diary of Susan Sontag.
'Vivid, exhilarating, often moving . . . charts the development of a
good writer and an important critic'Sunday Telegraph
'I intend to do everything . . . I shall anticipate pleasure
everywhere and find it too, for it is everywhere! I shall involve
myself wholly . . .everything matters!'
This first selection from Susan Sontag's diaries (from 1947-1963)
takes us from early adolescence though to when Sontag was in her early
thirties. It is an astonishingly affecting, honest self-portrait which
is also a fascinating, revealing account of an artist and critic being
born. We see Sontag honing her skills and fashioning herself, by a
supreme act of will, into an intellectual force.
'Fascinating. One can feel Sontag's mind beginning to ripen and
bloom, and the full force of the intellectual originality that would
be her hallmark emerging' Guardian
'Inspirational. Sontag shows us not just the importance, but the
exhilaration of being earnest' New Statesman
'A fascinating document of her apprenticeship, charting her earnest
quest for education, identity, and voice. Reborn is
overwhelmingly a record of an inner landscape' New York Review of Books
'One of the finest American writers, thinkers, and political
activists of the past four decades . . . an intimate portrait of her
early life' Independent on Sunday
One of America's best-known and most admired writers, Susan Sontag
was also a leading commentator on contemporary culture until her death
in December 2004. Her books include four novels and numerous works of
non-fiction, among them Regarding the Pain of Others, On
Photography, Illness as Metaphor, At the Same Time,
Against Interpretation and Other Essays and Reborn: Early
Diaries 1947-1963, all of which are published by Penguin. A
further eight books, including the collections of essays Under the
Sign of Saturn and Where the Stress Falls, and the novels
The Volcano Lover and The Benefactor, are available
from Penguin Modern Classics.
Susan Sontag was born in Manhattan in 1933 and studied at the
universities of Chicago, Harvard and Oxford. She is the author of four
novels, a collection of stories, several plays, and six books of essays,
among them
Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors.
Her books are translated into thirty-two languages. In 2001 she was
awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work, and in 2003 she
received the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and the Peace Prize
of the German Book Trade. She died in December 2004.
