Susan Sontag - Reborn (Penguin Books)

Reborn is the compelling and frank early diary of Susan Sontag. "Vivid, exhilarating, often moving...charts the development of a good writer and an important critic". (Sunday Telegraph). 'I intend to do everything...I shall anticipate pleasure everywhere and find it too, for it is everywhere!

I shall involve myself wholly...everything matters!' This first selection from Susan Sontag's diaries (from 1947-1963) takes us from early adolescence though to when Sontag was in her early thirties.

It is an astonishingly affecting, honest self-portrait which is also a fascinating, revealing account of an artist and critic being born. We see Sontag honing her skills and fashioning herself, żeby a supreme act of will, into an intellectual force.

"Fascinating. One can feel Sontag's mind beginning to ripen and bloom, and the full force of the intellectual originality that would be her hallmark emerging". (Guardian). "Inspirational.

Sontag shows us not just the importance, but the exhilaration of being earnest". (New Statesman). "A fascinating document of her apprenticeship, charting her earnest quest for education, identity, and voice.

Reborn is overwhelmingly a record of an inner landscape".(New York Review of Books). "One of the finest American writers, thinkers, and political activists of the past four decades...an intimate portrait of her early life".

(Independent on Sunday). One of America's best-known and most admired writers, Susan Sontag was also a leading commentator on contemporary culture until her death in December 2004. Her books include four novels and numerous works of non-fiction, among them Regarding the Pain of Others, On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, At the Same Time, Against Interpretation and Other Essays and Reborn: Early Diaries 1947-1963, all of which are published aby Penguin.

A further eight books, including the collections of essays Under the Sign of Saturn and Where the Stress Falls, and the novels The Volcano Lover and The Benefactor, are available from Penguin Modern Classics.