Where the Stress Falls

Thirty-five years after her first collection, the now classic Against Interpretation, America's most important essayist has chosen more than forty longer and shorter pieces from the last twenty years. Divided into three sections, the first "Reading" includes ardent pieces on writers from her own private canon - Machado de Assis, Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Borges, Tsvetaeva, and Elizabeth Hardwick. In the second, "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.

Reading
A Poet's Prose
Where the Stress Falls
Afterlives: The Case of Machado de Assis
A Mind in Mourning
The Wisdom Project
Writing Itself: On Roland Barthes
Walser's Voice
Danilo Kiš
Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke
Pedro Páramo
DQ
A Letter to Borges

Seeing
A Century of Cinema
Novel into Film: Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz
A Note on Bunraku
A Place for Fantasy
The Pleasure of the Image
About Hodgkin
A Lexicon for Available Light
In Memory of Their Feelings
Dancer and the Dance
Lincoln Kirstein
Wagner's Fluids
An Ecstasy of Lament
One Hundred Years of Italian Photography
On Bellocq
Borland's Babies
Certain Mapplethorpes
A Photograph is Not an Opinion. Or Is It?

There and Here
Homage to Halliburton
Singleness
Writing As Reading
Thirty Years Later . . .
Questions of Travel
The Idea of Europe (One More Elegy)
The Very Comical Lament of Pyramus and Thisbe (An Interlude)
Answers to a Questionnaire
Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo
"There" and "Here"
Joseph Brodsky
On Being Translated

Acknowledgments