The Reading Warehouse

Two decades of indispensable work by a great American writer-more than forty longer and shorter pieces that illustrate a deeply felt, kaleidoscopic array of interests, passions, observations, and ideas

Thirty-five years after her first collection, the classic Against Interpretation, America's most important essayist chose more than forty longer and shorter pieces from the previous twenty years. Reading, the first of three sections, includes ardent pieces on writers from Sontag's own private canon-Machado de Assis, Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Borges, Tsvetaeva, and Elizabeth Hardwick. In the second section, Seeing, she shares her passions for film, dance, photography, painting, opera, and theater. And in the final section, There and Here, Sontag explores her own commitments to the work (and activism) of conscience and to the vocation of the writer.

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.

Tavia Gilbert is an acclaimed narrator of more than four hundred full-cast and multivoice audiobooks for virtually every publisher in the industry. Named the 2018 Voice of Choice by Booklist magazine, she is also an Audie Award nominee and the recipient of numerous Earphones Awards, a Voice Arts Award, and a Listen-Up Award. With frequent inclusion on best of year and annual top ten lists, she is a trusted and increasingly sought-after actress for work across every genre, from children's and YA, to literary fiction, nonfiction, and genre fiction. Audible has named her a Genre-Defining Narrator: Master of Memoir, and Library Journal said of her, as close as you can get to a full-cast narration with a solo voice. She is a producer, singer, photographer, and a writer, as well as the cofounder of a feminist publishing company, Animal Mineral, with fiction and nonfiction focusing on relationships, love, and identity.