"Susan Sontag, my prose's prime mover, ate the world." — Wayne Koestenbaum

The quote from Wayne Koestenbaum comes from his essay in the recently published volume The Scandal of Susan Sontag. Tomorrow, January 16th would have been Sontag’s 77th birthday, so we thought it appropriate to highlight the book and Sontag herself.

Later in his essay Koestenbaum writes:

Transference: in the early 1990s, the night before I gave a lecture on Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, I dreamed that she reclined, wearing a pink miniskirt, on her living-room couch. I’ve had dozens of Sontag dreams, in which she represents intellectuality’s phantasmagoria, prose’s succulence, quality’s fearsomeness, and aphorism’s bite.

It is hard to imagine another intellectual or novelist inspiring such a dream and it speaks to the distinctive hold that Sontag has on her readers. This kind of fascination is reflected in the other essays in the book, including those by Terry Castle, E. Ann Kaplan, Jay Prosser, and Nancy K. Miller.

For more on Sontag here are clips from her appearances on “Charlie Rose”: