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Susan Sontag was 31 when “Notes on Camp” made her, almost overnight, one of the most talked-about critics in America — a short, aphoristic essay that took a supposedly frivolous aesthetic sensibility and treated it with the same seriousness critics usually reserved for high art. She spent the four decades that followed refusing to stay in one lane: cultural criticism, war reporting from Sarajevo, novels, essays on photography and illness, even directing films and plays. She won the National Book Award in 2000 for her novel In America and remained, until her death in 2004, one of the few American intellectuals equally comfortable writing about Godard and about her own cancer diagnosis. She is buried in the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris, among the writers she spent her career arguing with.
By Lisanne Swart · 14 books · Criticism & Fiction · Essays · Non-Fiction · Female Authors · Death · Updated July 2026
Novel
The Benefactor
Sontag’s first published book, a philosophical novel following an eccentric narrator obsessed with the meaning of his own dreams, written in a deliberately detached, almost clinical style influenced by the French nouveau roman movement.
A useful curiosity for readers who want to see Sontag working through ideas about detachment and interpretation in fiction before she made her name as an essayist — not the place to start if you want her most accessible work.
Essays · CriticismCore book
Against Interpretation and Other Essays
A collection gathering Sontag’s early essays and reviews, including “Notes on Camp,” the 1964 piece that made her a public intellectual almost overnight, and the title essay arguing that critics had become obsessed with excavating hidden meanings in art at the expense of experiencing its form and style directly.
This is where Sontag’s reputation begins, and it remains the most commonly recommended entry point into her work. “Notes on Camp” alone is worth the book — a short, numbered list of observations that reshaped how an entire generation talked about taste.
Novel
Death Kit
A disorienting novel following a man who may or may not have committed a murder on a train, blurring the line between what actually happens and what he only imagines, in a style that owes an obvious debt to Kafka.
Her second and least commercially successful novel — useful mainly for tracing how her early fiction experimented with unreliable perception before that concern moved into her nonfiction work on photography and interpretation.
Essays · Criticism
Styles of Radical Will
A second essay collection covering pornography as literature, the aesthetics of silence in art, and Sontag’s controversial travel essay on revolutionary Cuba and North Vietnam, showing her expanding from purely aesthetic criticism into political engagement.
Read this if Against Interpretation left you wanting to see how Sontag’s critical method applied to explicitly political subjects, not just art and taste.
Essays · Media CriticismCore book
On Photography
A collection of essays examining how photography has changed the way people experience reality, arguing that photographs turn lived experience into something collected and consumed, and that the camera’s apparent objectivity always conceals real choices about framing and exclusion. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Still the essential starting point for thinking critically about images, decades before smartphones made everyone a photographer. Her arguments about photographs distancing us from direct experience read as more, not less, relevant now.
Essays · MedicineCore book
Illness as Metaphor
Written after her own breast cancer diagnosis, this essay argues that the metaphors society attaches to diseases like cancer and tuberculosis — moral weakness, repressed emotion, personal failure — actively harm patients by adding shame and blame to physical illness. Sontag argues for stripping disease of metaphor entirely.
One of her most personal and most useful books — the argument holds up directly for anyone navigating a serious diagnosis today, not just as literary criticism but as a genuinely practical corrective to how we talk about sickness.
Short Stories
I, etcetera
A collection of short stories experimenting with form and voice, including “Project for a Trip to China,” reflecting on her father’s death in China before her birth, and other pieces that blur the line between fiction and essay.
Less discussed than her essay collections, but useful for seeing how her interest in fragmented, essayistic structure carried over into her fiction.
Essays · Criticism
Under the Sign of Saturn
A collection of essays and intellectual portraits of figures including Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and Leni Riefenstahl, examining melancholy, fascism, and the moral responsibilities of art and criticism.
Read this for Sontag as a portraitist of other thinkers — the Riefenstahl essay in particular is one of her sharpest examinations of how aesthetic beauty can serve morally troubling ends.
Essays · Medicine
AIDS and Its Metaphors
A direct sequel to Illness as Metaphor, extending the same argument to the AIDS epidemic, examining how the disease was framed through metaphors of plague, punishment, and moral contamination that intensified stigma against those affected.
Best read as a pair with Illness as Metaphor — together they show Sontag applying the same critical method to two different epidemics, twenty years and a very different cultural climate apart.
Novel
The Volcano Lover
A historical novel loosely based on the real love triangle between Sir William Hamilton, his wife Emma, and Admiral Horatio Nelson in late-18th-century Naples, exploring collecting, obsession, and the destruction that follows historical upheaval.
Her commercial breakthrough as a novelist — more traditionally plotted and readable than her earlier fiction, and a good choice if her essays interest you but you want to see her working in a more conventional narrative form.
Play
Alice in Bed
A play imagining the interior life of Alice James, sister of William and Henry James, who spent much of her adult life bedridden with undiagnosed illness, staged as a dreamlike exploration of a brilliant woman confined by illness and family expectation.
One of the few points where Sontag’s long-standing interest in illness as subject matter and her work as a director came together directly — useful if you want to see her ideas about sickness dramatized rather than argued.
NovelCore book
In America
A historical novel following a Polish actress who emigrates to America in the 1870s to found a utopian commune before returning to the stage, loosely inspired by the real actress Helena Modjeska. It won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2000.
Her most decorated novel and, alongside The Volcano Lover, the clearest evidence that her fiction deserves as much attention as her essays, even if the essays remain what she’s best remembered for.
Essays · War Photography
Regarding the Pain of Others
A late-career reconsideration and partial revision of arguments she’d made decades earlier in On Photography, examining how images of war and atrocity affect viewers, whether photographs of suffering can actually generate compassion or action, and what we owe to the people depicted in them.
Read this alongside On Photography to see Sontag revising her own earlier positions — she was willing to publicly reconsider arguments she’d made thirty years before, which is rarer among critics than it should be.
Essays · Posthumous
At the Same Time
A posthumous collection of essays and speeches from the final years of her life, edited by her son David Rieff, covering literature, human rights, and the responsibilities of the writer, including her final public lectures.
The closest thing to a final statement of her critical and political views, assembled after her death rather than by her own hand — a fitting capstone if you’ve read through her major work chronologically.
Where to start with Susan Sontag
If you have never read her
→ Start with Against Interpretation and Other Essays. “Notes on Camp” alone is worth the book, and it’s the clearest introduction to her critical voice.
If photography and media are what interest you
→ On Photography, then Regarding the Pain of Others as a later reconsideration of the same arguments.
If you want her most personal, most useful book
→ Illness as Metaphor, written after her own cancer diagnosis, remains sharply relevant for anyone navigating illness today.
If you want to see her as a novelist
→ The Volcano Lover and In America, her National Book Award winner, are both more traditionally plotted than her early fiction.
If the essay form specifically is what you’re after
→ My best essays to read list and my best non-fiction books list both have more in this tradition.
If illness, mortality, and how we talk about them is your entry point
→ My best books about death list has more writers working in that register.
Looking for what else I recommend
→ Every book I’ve personally reviewed lives on my bookshelf.
Frequently asked questions about Susan Sontag’s books
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On my shelf
My Bookshelf — Book Recommendations
Every book I have personally reviewed, in one place.
