✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

James Wolcott · All That Gab: The Upsides of Sontag’s Downsides

lrb.co.uk · 8,777 words · saved by 1 readers

Your 10-digit subscription number is above your name on the address slip and begins with 400. If you subscribed via the website, you can enter the order number from your subscription confirmation email in place of your subscription number. More search Options Browse by Subject B enjamin​ Moser begins his biography with a bang: ‘Susan Sontag was America’s last great literary star.’ In my gaudier moments I prefer to think of Sontag as American literature’s first and last great screen star. Transcending staid text, she was projected into the avid imaginations of legions of onlookers who didn’t know Walter Benjamin from Walter Brennan. Fascinated by Greta Garbo (‘I wanted to be Garbo,’ she wrote in her diary), Sontag managed to fashion a Garboesque mystique while carrying out the garrulous duties of a public intellectual for decades: speeches, interviews, conferences, symposia, all that gab. For much of its long, eventful haul, Moser’s Life resembles a movie goddess biography

Vol. 41 No. 20 · 24 October 2019 All That Gab James Wolcott Share on Bluesky Share on Facebook Share Email Print 7990 words Sontag: Her Life by Benjamin Moser . Allen Lane, 832 pp., £30, September 2019, 978 0 241 00348 0 Show More Show More B enjamin ​ Moser begins his biography with a bang: 'Susan Sontag was America's last great literary star.' In my gaudier moments I prefer to think of Sontag as American literature's first and last great screen star. Transcending staid text, she was projected into the avid imaginations of legions of onlookers who didn't know Walter Benjamin from

Explore this link on the map →

related reading