"Introduction by Susan Sontag"

pretty sure i've got some others on my shelves

e.g. emil cioran - the temptation to exist

I am sure you do, partly want to use this to get more recommendations. I think we only have a 'major disagreement' on Thomas Mann.

Kept it to fiction excluding the likes of Barthes and Paul Goodman. xp

Are we voting for the best book (IMO Pedro Paramo) or the best introduction (IMO Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings, though it's not on the list)?

I suppose a book that combines both too? More about the comments anyway.

Amazon searching is awful. Saw Summer in Baden-Baden just now.

I think most of Sontag's strongest introductions are collected in Under the Sign of Saturn, but the Verso anthology of Walter Benjamin's writings, One-Way Street and Other Writings (the UK analogue of Reflections), would probably be have my favorite combination of book and preface, though it seems to be out of print and all its essays can be found in the Harvard UP Selected Writings.

"would probably be have"="would probably be"

please tell me one worthwhile or interesting thing sontag has said in this context

I've never enjoyed her introductions (I can't really remember any of them tbh, though I know I must have read them) but she does have very good taste in books to introduce.

Yeah her tastes are impeccable. I suppose she never liked much pulp or SF, otoh she was looking at non-English literatures, which is its own brand of renegade.

Was re-reading her intro to the Serge last night. Some people could find the first few pages of her answering the qn "why is this novel neglected?", each para starting with "is it because...", to be somewhat wearying. Especially when the answer to English readers is that he was simply a writer in a foreign language -- the vast majority of whom aren't read. In the end its a device to weave biog and the complicated relationship all sorts of writers had with the Soviet Union. She really explains, maps out and gives context.

I remember thinking the bataille one bad and the walser one nugatory in content

I don't love her as an essayist the way I do, say, Baldwin, Benjamin, Didion, Barthes, or Woolf, but her Artaud introduction is thoughtful and comprehensive, and I like the lyricism of her introduction to Benjamin even if it leans too heavily on cliches about his melancholy in place of serious engagement with his relation to Marxism; I agree that her later introductions are relatively slight, but she has a gift for conveying context, and she has marvelous taste in books to introduce.

Since I don't have an edit function, I'll make clear that my last clause was meant to second woof's judgment rather than plagiarize his way of wording it. My apologies.

voted for pedro

Sontag v much follows on from Walter Benjamin for me, its that antennae to catch anything and everything. But I don't think there is anywhere near enough Benjamin available in English to see how both compare. I'd say he was more of a theorist with a capital T and Sontag really looked at things and saw trends.

The other writers (don't know Baldwin at all) are commentators/theorists and throw matter back at their own cultures. Sontag really felt international.

For me this is Serge vs Rulfo vs Tsvetaeva (Sontag captures what's good here when she formulates the prose as having a "fervour, density, velocity, fibre").

There's a fair amount of Benjamin in English by now, I think--the Harvard Selected Writings, by including more of his journalism and working notes, capture more of his (admittedly still idiosyncratic) engagement with the material culture and political struggles of interwar Europe. (I'd agree that Benjamin belongs more to "high Theory," though.) Baldwin mostly writes with an eye on racism and identity in the American context, but he has some striking essays on African-American experience overseas, particularly "Equal in Paris," "Stranger in the Village," (both collected in Notes of a Native Son, perhaps his strongest collection of essays), "The Discovery of What it Means to Be an American," and "The New Lost Generation"--he often reworks Henry James's "international theme" in unexpected ways.

...Although, admittedly, he reworks the "international theme" for a specific national audience, so your point probably stands.

I don't have that collection of Marina Tsvetaeva, nor do I know anything about Sontag, but I hold Tsvetaeva's poetry closer to my heart than probably any other poet.

I suddenly became obsessed with Tsvetaeva in my late 20's. Then one day this really handsome stranger came up to me at a coffee shop and gave me "In the Inmost Hour of the Soul". I had only been able to find "The Selected Poems" and "The Ratcatcher" at the library and no bookstore in town had anything. I devoured the book and it was one of my treasured possessions for years. Two years ago I found "Tsvetaeva" by by Viktoria Schweitzer, a biography that I felt was as complete as I am going to get.

Then one day this really handsome stranger came up to me at a coffee shop and gave me "In the Inmost Hour of the Soul".

Amazing *tera, was it random?

Her biog is awful really, read a couple of essays in the LRB (incl a review of that biog).

From the same period I like Mandelstam although I find Marina more affecting. Only Platonov matches either on the prose front (but in a v diff way) (don't think Sontag is that familiar with Russian 20th century prose, doesn't mention him or Shamalov).

From the same period of poetry I would add Vallejo and Pessoa, maybe Rilke but the translations from the latter have been unsatisfying to me.

I want to read these letters too.

There's a fair amount of Benjamin in English by now, I think--the Harvard Selected Writings, by including more of his journalism and working notes, capture more of his (admittedly still idiosyncratic) engagement with the material culture and political struggles of interwar Europe.

Sorry I wasn't being specific I was thinking more of a collection of Benjamin's literary criticism. I think there is 500+ page collection in German that has yet to be translated.

Otherwise there is quite a lot of Benjamin in English.

it's incredible to me though that with dudes like that there is still stuff that's yet to be translated. a friend of mine recently translated this adorno essay on kierkegaard which had never been published before. i read it last weekend in order to provide some feedback on readability and so forth, and it's an INCREDIBLE essay that actually clarified a lot for me, not so much about kierkegaard who i've read a good deal of but about adorno. the latter really lays out many of the main pillars of his thought in a way that seems uncharacteristically systematic. i would think it would have been one of the first things people translated, but nope.

*published before in english, sorry. it's going to be published in Telos later this year if anyone is interested.

That's interesting; I'm curious what relation that essay might have to Adorno's Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic.

it was written way way later, and it uses kierkegaard as a point of entry to criticize the general intellectual tendency in the modern era to pursue "authenticity", or this position of separateness from social relations. obviously for adorno dialectical ideology critique must proceed from the premise that we are always enmeshed in whatever we are criticizing; our thinking too is dominated by the commodity form, doesn't matter who you are. that's what this essay is about.

Hmm, I wonder if this is "Kierkegaard noch einmal" from 1963. It sounds fascinating, anyway; thanks for the lead, Treeship!

Yeah, it is that essay.

Then one day this really handsome stranger came up to me at a coffee shop and gave me "In the Inmost Hour of the Soul".
Amazing *tera, was it random?

well that random stranger was me

It was completely random making that stranger very significant. Saw him a few times after that and wanted to talk about Tsvetaeva and the book but it never happened. Hung out once, long enough to grab a bite to eat at a grocery store but not enough time to talk about the book. So my question of why the book was never answered. Over a decade later a rather strange cowinkydink brought him to me and we got married.

haha I don't know why I read the stranger as "random". What happens when I start reading ilx with no caffeine in me.

Anyway, def hunt down the prose.

it's incredible to me though that with dudes like that there is still stuff that's yet to be translated.

Not that unusual in regards to a lot of Germanic thought and fiction I find..

Or 70's and 80's french poets, I've been hoping for complete translations of Andrés du Bouchet, Jacques Dupin or Emmanuel Hocquard.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/20/books/review/20SONTAGL.html?_r=0

^ her intro to Under the Glacier

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

No votes for Story of the Eye?

here's a post-vote vote for the bataille. didn't vote cause that's the only one i've read of these. if nothing else this is a good reminder to finally get around to reading epitaph of a small winner (non-sontag edition)and ferdydurke. that oberiu anthology looks really interesting.

Did she have something in the edition of de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom I have in London. It's the one with a white cover with a blue title box, there is a version of Justine in the series but title box is orange.
Not sure if it is an introduction or other essay. I just have a vague memory that it does have some Sontag content. It's several hundred miles away and I haven't looked at it at all recently.

The only versions I have seen have essays by De Beauvoir and Klossowski.