Under the Sign of Saturn, Susan Sontag
Under the Sign of Saturn, Susan Sontag
List: $19.95 | Sale: $13.97
Club: $9.97

Under the Sign of Saturn
Essays

Author: Susan Sontag

Narrator: Tavia Gilbert

Unabridged: 6 hr 9 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 03/27/2018

Categories: Nonfiction, Philosophy


Synopsis

Sontag’s most important critical writings from 1972 to 1980 are collected in Under the Sign of Saturn. One of America’s leading essayists, Sontag’s writings are commentaries on the relation between moral and aesthetic ideas, discussing the works of Antonin Artaud, Leni Riefenstahl, Elias Canetti, Walter Benjamin, and others. The collection includes a variety of her well-known essays. In “Fascinating Fascism,” Sontag eviscerates Leni Riefenstahl’s attempts to rehabilitate her image after working for Adolf Hitler on propaganda films during World War II. “Approaching Artaud” reflects on the work and influence of french actor, director, and writer Antonin Artaud. The title essay is a study of the life and temperament of Walter Benjamin, who Sontag describes as a sad and lonesome man. The book also includes the essays “On Paul Goodman,” “Syberberg’s Hitler,” “Remembering Barthes,” and “Mind as Passion”.Susan Sontag’s writings are famously full of intellectual range and depth, and are at turns exhilarating, ominous, disturbing, and beautiful. Under the Sign of Saturn manages to touch on all of these notes and more.

About Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) was born in Manhattan 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 Against Interpretation and On Photography. 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.

About Tavia Gilbert

Tavia Gilbert is an acclaimed producer, narrator, writer, and stage and film actor. An Audie and Earphones award winner, she has been nominated for nearly every possible award and has been named an Audiobook Narrator of the Year by Booklist Magazine. Part of the Grammy-nominated full-cast recording of Charlotte’s Web, she has narrated more than 700 solo, multi-cast, and full-cast titles.


Reviews

Goodreads review by spillingthematcha on May 08, 2023

Nieustannie jestem pod wrażeniem erudycji oraz przenikliwości twórczości Sontag.......more

Goodreads review by Jonfaith on August 20, 2018

Time does not give one much leeway: it thrusts us forward from behind, blows us through the narrow tunnel of the present into the future. But space is broad, teeming with possibilities, positions, intersections, passages, detours, U-turns, dead-ends, one-way streets. This is an important collection......more

Goodreads review by Mr. on October 07, 2008

Sontag has once again compiled an intelligent collection of essays on widely varying aesthetic topics. Though she begins with a rather artificial and patronizing obituary for the late man of letters Paul Goodman, whose body of work she is evidently less than enthused with, though she feels obliged t......more

Goodreads review by J on July 19, 2014

Sontag, as ever, manages to craft writings of remarkable intellectual range and depth on pretty much anything she focuses. Under the Sign of Saturn feels a bit darker than some of her other books I've read, in so far is a lot of the essays focus on (both directly and implicity) fascism and its broad......more

Goodreads review by Natalia on August 24, 2021

literally drop dead gorgeous the coolest most insightful queen, I had no idea this is even possible......more


Quotes

“No one has written more passionately about Antonin Artaud….Nor has anyone before Sontag taken the pains to demolish so thoroughly Hitler’s favorite moviemaker, Leni Riefenstahl.” Chicago Tribune

“In this collection, Sontag masters all she chooses to survey.” Chicago Sun-Times

“Attending to the more provocative issues of the day, Sontag has created a body of work of exemplary merit.” Boston Globe