At The Same Time
by Susan Sontag
“A writer is someone who pays attention to the world,” Susan Sontag once said, and no one exemplified this definition more than she did. Sontag’s incisive intelligence, expressive brilliance and deep curiosity about art, politics and the writer’s responsibility to bear witness have secured her place as one of the most important thinkers and writers of the twentieth century.
At the Same Time gathers sixteen essays and addresses written in the last years of Sontag’s life, when her work was being honoured on the international stage. They reflect on the personally liberating nature of literature, her deepest commitment, and on political activism and resistance to injustice as an ethical duty. She considers the works of writers who enlarge our understanding of both ourselves ad the world around us, and also boldly addresses the dilemmas of post-9/11 America, from the degradation of US political rhetoric to the appalling torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib.
With a preface by Sontag’s son, David Rieff, At the Same Time is a passionate, compelling work from an American writer at the height of her powers who always saw literature ‘as a passport to enter a larger life, the zone of freedom’.
‘These 16 pieces brim over with vitality. Every one of them opening up fresh lines of thought, they are in no sense last words… Intellectually and imaginatively gifted to an extraordinary degree, [Sontag] used her fearless intelligence to illuminate some of the deepest contradictions of contemporary life… In At the Same Time we hear the voice of a unique writer, who loved the world and spent her life in an attempt to see it whole’
John Gray, New Statesman
