Debriefing: Collected Stories

by Susan Sontag

Overview

A collection of short fiction from Susan Sontag, the National Book Award-winning author of In America and Against Interpretation, and the renowned essayist praised as “one of our very few brand-name intellectuals” (The Yale Review).

An invaluable record of the creative output of one of the most inquisitive and analytical thinkers of the twentieth century at the height of her power, Debriefing collects all of Susan Sontag’s shorter fiction, a form she turned to intermittently throughout her writing life.

Ranging from allegory to parable to autobiography, these stories show Sontag wrestling with problems beyond the essayistic form, her more customary mode. Here, she catches fragments of life on the fly, dramatizes her private griefs and fears, and lets characters take her where they will. The result is a collection of remarkable brilliance, versatility, and charm. Sontag’s work has typically required time for people to catch up to it. These challenging works of literary art—made more urgent by the passage of years—await a new generation of readers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250192769
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	12/04/2018
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Susan Sontag was the author of four novels, including The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America, which won the 2000 National Book Award for fiction; a collection of stories, I, etcetera; several plays, including Alice in Bed; and nine works of essays, among them On Photography, which won the National Books Critics Circle Award for criticism. In 2001, Sontag was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work. She died in New York City in 2004.

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

PILGRIMAGE

PROJECT FOR A TRIP TO CHINA

AMERICAN SPIRITS

THE LETTER SCENE

THE DUMMY

UNGUIDED TOUR

OLD COMPLAINTS REVISITED

BABY

DOCTOR JEKYLL

DEBRIEFING

THE WAY WE LIVE NOW

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Susan Sontag

“The cumulative effect of her writing is to stimulate the flow of argument. . .you might say she has diverted the mainstream; her private islands of thought now look like the territory on which we've always lived. . .She stands for what is articulate, independent, exploratory: for self as a work in progress. —Hilary Mantel, The Los Angeles Times Book Review

Susan Sontag is a powerful thinker, as smart as she's supposed to be, and a better writer, sentence for sentence, than anyone who now wears the tag 'intellectual.' —Adam Begley, The New York Observer

[Sontag is] one of our very few brand-name intellectuals. . .the bearer of the standard of high seriousness in a culture that has essentially capitulated to the easy lifting of the ironic mode or the ready clasp of pure entertainment. —Sven Birkets, The Yale Review

“We wouldn't recognize our postwar intellectual history without Susan Sontag.” —Talk Magazine

From the Publisher

09/18/2017
The first complete collection of the late Sontag’s stories affirms both the range and depth of her literary gifts. The volume adds three previously uncollected works, all first published in the New Yorker, to the eight collected as I, Etcetera in 1978. Among the new stories, “Pilgrimage” is a straightforward semiautobiographical narrative—a rarity for Sontag—that chronicles a California teenager’s awkward visit to iconic author Thomas Mann. Less conventionally shaped, “The Letter Scene” fuses instances of letter-writing from the arts, the news, and the narrator’s memory into a haunting meditation on love, time, and distance both physical and psychic. “The Way We Live Now” follows an unnamed man with an unnamed disease (that is clearly AIDS) through a sequence of discussions between his friends. First published in 1986, the story pays compelling witness to both its historical moment and the timeless mystery of suffering. Among previously collected works, “Debriefing,” “Project for a Trip to China,” and “Unguided Tour” in particular stand out for their fierce imaginative and intellectual power. Sontag’s best short fiction is sometimes overlooked because her essays and novels are so strong; this new collection is testament to the fact that, though she did not write short stories often, she wrote them well. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

10/01/2017
This complete collection of National Book Award winner Sontag's (In America; The Volcano Lover) short fiction, edited by Taylor (Saul Bellow: Letters), contains 11 eclectic stories. "Pilgrimage," the first work, is a sweet, humorous, and expertly crafted tale of two teenagers meeting Thomas Mann. This is followed by a piece that reads more like a poem ("Project for a Trip to China") and then an imaginative, surreal tale ("American Spirits"). In "The Dummy," a man unsatisfied with his life makes a robotic replica of himself to perform what he views as daily drudgery, allowing him to devote all of his attention to pleasure. His family and coworkers are not able to tell the difference between the real man and the robot. "Debriefing," the title work, provides a friend's accounting of an elusive woman named Julia. Ultimately, these works cannot be easily defined; they are often experimental, quite beautiful, and represent the freedom and courage of a mind in love with language. VERDICT Sontag's status as an established novelist, essayist, and critic, and that this is the only collection of her short fiction, will make this a popular choice. [See Prepub Alert, 5/15/17.]—Stacy Russo, Santa Ana Coll. Lib., CA

Library Journal