Reading List

Authors Like Susan Sontag

In December 1964 Partisan Review printed “Notes on ‘Camp’”, fifty-eight numbered notes dedicated to Oscar Wilde by a thirty-one-year-old New Yorker named Susan Sontag, and it made her famous almost overnight. She went on to write On Photography (1977), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, Illness as Metaphor (1978) and Regarding the Pain of Others (2003); in 1993 she staged Waiting for Godot by candlelight in besieged Sarajevo, and in 2000 her novel In America won the National Book Award. Readers come to her for an essay that takes a subject everyone thinks they already understand — a photograph, a disease, a style — and shows how much thinking it still needs. The writers below share that habit: they treat criticism as a serious form, write about images, politics and other people's suffering without comfort, and assume the reader can keep up.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Essays · Criticism · Photography and seeing · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love Susan Sontag, start with Roland Barthes, whose Camera Lucida is the other great book on photography, and John Berger's Ways of Seeing. For the political side of her thinking, read Hannah Arendt. For the essay as a precise, cold instrument, Joan Didion and Janet Malcolm. And for who carries her line now, Maggie Nelson.

10 authors like Susan Sontag

01
The other book on photography

Roland Barthes

French · b. 1915 · Critic

Barthes was born in Cherbourg in 1915 and became the most influential French critic of his generation. Mythologies (1957) reads wrestling, soap powder and steak frites as signs; A Lover's Discourse (1977) is a book of fragments on being in love. Camera Lucida, written after his mother's death and built on the terms studium and punctum, appeared in 1980, two months before he died after being struck by a laundry van in Paris.

The closest match. Sontag wrote about him twice — “Remembering Barthes” and “Writing Itself”, her introduction to A Barthes Reader (1982) — and Camera Lucida and On Photography are still the two books everyone reads on the subject. Where Sontag argues about what photographs do to a culture, Barthes looks for the one detail in one photograph that wounds him. Read them together.

— Lisanne
02
The political essay at full weight

Hannah Arendt

German-American · b. 1906 · Political theorist

Arendt fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and reached New York in 1941. The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and The Human Condition (1958) made her name; Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), first published as reports in The New Yorker, introduced the phrase “the banality of evil” and was fiercely attacked for its account of the Jewish councils. In 1968 she edited Illuminations, the collection that introduced Walter Benjamin to English-language readers.

Sontag's seriousness, applied to politics instead of culture. Both refuse the comfortable moral position, both were attacked for it, and both write as if an argument matters more than being liked. Eichmann in Jerusalem is the place to start: reportage that turns into philosophy on the page.

— Lisanne

Every book by Hannah Arendt →

03
The critic Sontag wrote her best portrait of

Walter Benjamin

German · b. 1892 · Critic and essayist

Benjamin was a Berlin-born critic whose essays on Baudelaire, Kafka, photography and the city became founding texts of modern cultural criticism. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” appeared in 1935–36; The Arcades Project, unfinished, was published in 1982. He died at Portbou on the French–Spanish border in 1940 while trying to escape the Nazis.

Sontag's essay on him, “Under the Sign of Saturn”, gave its title to her 1980 collection, and it reads as half self-portrait. His fragments on photography sit behind On Photography, and his method — the essay as a collection of quotations and sharp single thoughts — is the one she used there. Start with Illuminations.

— Lisanne
Every book by Walter Benjamin →
04
Ways of seeing, in plain words

John Berger

English · b. 1926 · Critic and novelist · Booker 1972

Berger was a London-born art critic, novelist and painter who lived in France for more than fifty years. Ways of Seeing, a BBC series and book in 1972, changed how a generation looked at paintings and advertising. His novel G. won the Booker Prize the same year; he gave half the money to the British Black Panthers. About Looking (1980) collects his essays on photography.

The warmer, more political counterpart to On Photography. Berger asks the same question as Sontag — what an image does to the person looking at it — but answers it in short, plain sentences and from the side of the people in the picture. The two appeared together in a televised discussion, and their books on photography have been argued over side by side ever since.

— Lisanne
05
The same precision, colder

Joan Didion

American · b. 1934 · Essayist · National Book Award 2005

Didion was born in Sacramento and made her name with the essays of Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), on California and the 1960s coming apart. The Year of Magical Thinking, about the year after her husband's death, won the National Book Award in 2005. She also wrote novels and, with John Gregory Dunne, screenplays.

The other great American essayist of Sontag's generation, and the opposite temperament. Sontag argues from ideas towards the world; Didion starts with a detail — a dress, a highway, a migraine — and lets it carry the argument. Both distrust the stories a culture tells itself, and both write sentences that refuse to reassure.

— Lisanne

Every book by Joan Didion →

06
New York criticism, from the founding

Elizabeth Hardwick

American · b. 1916 · Essayist and novelist

Hardwick came to New York from Kentucky and moved among the Partisan Review circle in the 1940s. In 1963, during a New York newspaper strike, she helped found The New York Review of Books with Robert Lowell, to whom she was married from 1949 to 1972, and Jason and Barbara Epstein. Seduction and Betrayal is a book of essays on women in literature; Sleepless Nights is a fragmentary novel drawn from her own life.

The world Sontag wrote in, seen from its centre. Hardwick's essays are as exacting as Sontag's but stranger and more personal in their syntax, and Sleepless Nights does in fiction what Sontag's notebooks do in private: thinks in fragments. If you love Sontag's long pieces in the New York Review, Hardwick is where that house style began.

— Lisanne

Every book by Elizabeth Hardwick →

07
The essay as cross-examination

Janet Malcolm

American · b. 1934 · Journalist and essayist

Malcolm was born in Prague in 1934, grew up in New York and wrote for The New Yorker for more than fifty years. The Journalist and the Murderer (1990) opens by calling journalism morally indefensible; The Silent Woman (1994) is about Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes and their biographers. The psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson sued her for libel over quotations in In the Freud Archives (1984); in 1994 a jury found in her favour.

Sontag asked what photographs do to the people in them; Malcolm asks what writing does to the people it is about, including her own. Both are hard on their subjects and harder on their readers' assumptions, and both treat the ethics of looking as the real story. Start with The Journalist and the Murderer.

— Lisanne

Every book by Janet Malcolm →

08
Moral urgency, no softening

James Baldwin

American · b. 1924 · Essayist and novelist

Baldwin was born in Harlem in 1924 and spent much of his life in France. Notes of a Native Son (1955) and The Fire Next Time (1963) are among the most important American essays on race; his novels include Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) and Giovanni's Room (1956).

The essayist who matches Sontag's moral seriousness and exceeds her heat. Both insist that a culture has to look at what it would rather not see; Baldwin does it from inside the story, with a preacher's rhythm, where Sontag stands back and analyses. The Fire Next Time reads in an evening and stays for years.

— Lisanne

Every book by James Baldwin →

09
The essay that wanders and argues

Rebecca Solnit

American · b. 1961 · Essayist · National Book Critics Circle Award 2004

Solnit is a San Francisco writer of more than twenty books on landscape, politics, art and feminism. River of Shadows (2003), about the photographer Eadweard Muybridge, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Men Explain Things to Me (2014) is widely credited with inspiring the word “mansplaining”; Orwell's Roses appeared in 2021.

A warmer, more associative version of Sontag's essay, moving between memoir, politics and history where Sontag argues in straight lines. River of Shadows is the direct link: a book about photography and what it did to time, written in the tradition On Photography opened.

— Lisanne

Every book by Rebecca Solnit →

10
Where the line goes now

Maggie Nelson

American · b. 1973 · Poet and essayist · National Book Critics Circle Award 2015

Nelson grew up in Marin County, California, and writes books that mix criticism, memoir and theory: Bluets (2009), The Art of Cruelty (2011), The Argonauts (2015) and On Freedom (2021). The Argonauts won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, and she received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2016.

A living writer often compared with Sontag. The Art of Cruelty takes up the questions Sontag asked about violent images — Abu Ghraib, horror films, Francis Bacon; On Freedom has her range across art, sex and politics. Nelson is more personal and more doubtful than Sontag, but she writes criticism with the same appetite.

— Lisanne

Every book by Maggie Nelson →

Where to start if you loved Susan Sontag

If you came for On Photography, read Roland Barthes.

Camera Lucida: the same subject, from inside one grief.

If you want her politics, read Hannah Arendt.

Eichmann in Jerusalem — reporting that becomes philosophy.

If you want the essay as a scalpel, read Janet Malcolm.

The Journalist and the Murderer, all of it in one sitting.

If you want someone writing like this now, read Maggie Nelson.

The Art of Cruelty, then The Argonauts.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Susan Sontag

Who should I read if I love Susan Sontag?

Start with Roland Barthes and John Berger, who wrote the other essential books on photography, and Walter Benjamin, the critic Sontag wrote about in Under the Sign of Saturn. For political thinking, read Hannah Arendt. For American essays with the same precision, Joan Didion, Elizabeth Hardwick and Janet Malcolm. Among living writers, Rebecca Solnit and Maggie Nelson are the closest.

What books are like On Photography?

Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida (1980) and John Berger's Ways of Seeing (1972) and About Looking (1980) are the standard companions. Walter Benjamin's essays on photography and mechanical reproduction sit behind all three. Rebecca Solnit's River of Shadows (2003), about Eadweard Muybridge, and Sontag's own Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) are the next books to read.

What should I read first by Susan Sontag?

Against Interpretation (1966), which includes “Notes on ‘Camp’”, shows her early range. On Photography (1977) is her best-known book; Illness as Metaphor (1978) is short and direct. For fiction, The Volcano Lover (1992) is the most readable of her novels.

Was Susan Sontag accused of plagiarism?

Yes. In 2000 the writer Ellen Lee identified passages in In America that closely followed four books about the actress Helena Modjeska without credit; Sontag defended the borrowing as allusion. The novel won the National Book Award that year.

Did Susan Sontag write Freud: The Mind of the Moralist?

The book was published in 1959 under the name of her then husband, Philip Rieff. Sontag researched it and is widely regarded as an uncredited co-author; Benjamin Moser's biography Sontag: Her Life and Work (2019) argues she wrote much of it.

What is the best biography of Susan Sontag?

Benjamin Moser's authorised Sontag: Her Life and Work (2019), which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2020. It covers her writing, her illnesses, her relationship with Annie Leibovitz and the dispute over the Freud book.

Is Joan Didion like Susan Sontag?

They are the two great American essayists of the same generation, and both refuse to soften what they see. But Sontag works from ideas and argument, while Didion works from a detail or a scene and lets it carry the meaning. Read On Photography and The White Album side by side to see the difference.

Footnotes

  1. Susan Sontag — Wikipedia
  2. Notes on "Camp" — Wikipedia
  3. Brown alumnus captures Pulitzer Prize for Susan Sontag biography — Brown University
  4. Camera Lucida (book) — Wikipedia
  5. John Berger — Wikipedia
  6. Janet Malcolm — Wikipedia
  7. Elizabeth Hardwick, A N.Y. Review founder, 91 — Philadelphia Inquirer
  8. Oh, Cruel, Cruel World: Pondering Art And Sadism — NPR

List last reviewed 15 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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