Sontag

Moser intelligently brings together both public and private, onstage and off-. His scrutiny of her essays, fiction, films, and political activism is clear-eyed, his analysis of her tumultuous affective life sympathetic… Sontag offers a thoroughly researched chronicle of an unparalleled American figure and the institutions tied to her… deft and sometimes dishy * Bookforum *Moser does rather a brilliant job…we have Sontag as daughter, friend, lover, wife and mother, but Moser’s writing is appropriately bold and anecdotal, so there is less the feeling of years accrued than of selves tried out. He’s an essayist, taking on an essayist, and his best passages are biographical readings of her writing. His assessment of her novels is punchy and insightful…this biography keeps her defiantly alive: argumentative, wilful, often right, always interesting, encouraging us to up our game as we watch her at the top of hers * The Guardian *Moser is good at elucidating Sontag’s ideas and putting into context the fecundity of her thought. He discusses her “Olympian” sex life with sympathy and insight - her galaxy of lovers included Bobby Kennedy, Jasper Johns, Warren Beatty and Annie Leibovitz - and is unbiased when it comes to evaluating her writing * The Sunday Times *Moser’s socially panoramic, psychologically incisive biography does a superb job of charting Sontag’s self-invention * The Guardian *There can be no doubting the brilliance - the sheer explanatory vigour - of Moser’s biography… a triumph of the virtues of seriousness and truth-telling that Susan Sontag espoused again and again but was conspicuously and often quite consciously unable to force herself to live by. * The New Statesman *Moser has had the confidence and erudition to bring all of [Sontag’s] contradictory aspects together in a biography fully commensurate with the scale of his subject. He is…a gifted, compassionate writer. * The TLS *A portrait of the intellectual conscience of the babyboomer generation - faults and all * The Financial Times *Sensational…provides an indelible portrait of a personality, a career and various milieu – Leo Robson * Books of the Year, New Statesman *Evocative and entertaining…Moser renders Sontag’s ascent to intellectual stardom as a rich and often rollicking affair * The Best Books of 2019, Oprah Magazine *An exhausting biography about an exhausting woman that will keep you up nights greedily reading all 800 pages until you pass out exhausted yourself - exhilarated and amazed at this difficult, brilliant but clueless writer’s life. – John Waters * The Amazon Book Review *

Benjamin Moser is the author of Why This World- A Biography of Clarice Lispector, a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award. His work bringing Clarice Lispector to international prominence was recognized with Brazil’s State Prize for Cultural Diplomacy. His most recent book, Sontag- Her Life, won the Pulitzer Prize. He lives in Utrecht, in the central Netherlands.