In the following interview, conducted in July, 1994, Sontag reveals the authors who have inspired and influenced her literary career, comments on the craft of writing, and elaborates on the different approaches she takes between writing essays and writing fiction.

In the following essay, Sayres examines both Sontag's fiction and her essays, focusing on her epigrammatic style, her multilayered studies into contradictions and negations, and modernist theories.

In the following essay, Kimball explores the inconsistencies he has found in several of Sontag's essays. Kimball argues against many of Sontag's conclusions, noting that she frequently contradicts herself in her own essays.

In the following essay, Frank explores the relationship between camp and gay culture in Sontag's writing.

In the following essay, Rollyson explores the similarities between Hippolyte, the main character in The Benefactor, and John Neal, the protagonist in Kenneth Burke's Towards a Better Life.

In the following interview, Sontag discusses her production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo.

In the following review, Wood contends that in contemporary society the historical novel has become an overworked and tedious genre, but that In America is an exception, characterizing the book as nicely balanced with insight, theatricality, and riveting narration.

In the following review, Wood analyzes the depiction of self-determination in In America, noting that many of Sontag's theories on society, American culture, and human will are apparent in the novel.

[The following excerpt is taken from an essay originally published in The New Republic, May 3, 1969.] That Susan Sontag is philosophically oriented and has something of a metaphysical impulse to her thinking … is among the reasons why I think her one of the most interesting and valuable critics we possess, a writer from whom it's continually possible to learn, even when you're most dissatisfied with what she's saying, or perhaps especially at those times. For the past several yea...

In the following essay, Todorov analyzes human preoccupation with suffering, and categorizes Regarding the Pain of Others as a valuable study in this phenomenon.

More than any other writer today, Susan Sontag has suffered from bad criticism and good publicity. If she could be rescued from all her culture-hungry interpreters, it might be possible to find the writer who has been made into a symbol. This is no longer easy because a popular conception of her has been rigged before a natural one could develop—like a premature legend…. The standard picture now in circulation is that of the up-to-date radical, a stand-in for everything advanced, extreme and o...

Below, MacFarquhar reviews Liam Kennedy's Susan Sontag: Mind as Passion, a study of Sontag's writings and their historical context.

In the following review, Nehamas praises Sontag's opinions in Regarding the Pain of Others, contending that she makes honest assertions about the effects that pictures depicting brutality and suffering can have on the public.

In the following review of A Susan Sontag Reader, Goodman studies the vehemence and political leanings of Sontag's essays throughout her career. Goodman asserts that Sontag is becoming less radical and extremist as she matures, detecting a more moderate stance in her views and writings.

In the following review, Kleinman praises Regarding the Pain of Others for not only displaying human fascination with images of death and pain, but for urging readers to view such images with sympathy and compassion.

In the following review, Nelson examines the changing tones amongst the essays collected in Where the Stress Falls.

In the following review, Spalding finds that Sontag's essays in Where the Stress Falls appear pessimistic concerning the state of current arts and society, and deems that Sontag is at her best when indignantly taking an unpopular stance on issues.

Susan Sontag: the name is a resonance of qualities, of quality itself. The drama of the idea, the composition, a recognition from the past that tells us what the present may bestow when we see her name. The term "essay" itself is somewhat flat as a definition of the liberality of her floating, restless expositions. A Susan Sontag Reader, a choice from her criticism and fiction, is in no way scant, but it interested me to note that one could regret the omission of almost any piece of her writin...

In the following essay, Gilbert discusses Sontag's writings on cancer and AIDS, using interview quotes to illustrate the author's opinions and confusion surrounding the social implications involved with these diseases.

In the following review, Lester compares and contrasts Regarding the Pain of Others with Brian Goldfarb's Visual Pedagogy: Media Cultures in and beyond the Classroom.

In that ideal Republic which is invoked by anyone who writes a criticism of life, Susan Sontag would have no status, since her mind is nourished solely on products of decomposition. Her opportunity depends absolutely on there being a condition of latent anarchy to sanction the impudence with which she defines the condition as admirable…. Miss Sontag has many of the secondary attributes of a professional revolutionary: an irreparable want of humor, a sweeping disregard of the nuances of history, a hat...

A fully established American figure, Sontag is ready for the archive; and so, appropriately, we have A Susan Sontag Reader. It's not the Reader—maybe there will be a sequel—but it offers a heavy sampling of her work, from her first novel, The Benefactor (1963), through her obituary essay on Roland Barthes (1981), all selected by Sontag herself. Ordinarily, writers are dead or incapacitated before Readers are bestowed on them. Sontag is neither—though you'd never know it fr...

In the following review, McLemee expresses his disappointment with the essays in Where the Stress Falls, finding Sontag's approach egotistical and clichéd, and asserting the writing lacks the biting observations of her earlier writings.

In the following review of Alice in Bed, Lewis argues that Sontag fails to bring her characters to life and concludes that the best part of the book is the afterword in which Sontag explains her intent.

In the following review, Lewis provides a negative assessment of Alice in Bed, contending that the character's words and actions are inaccurate, implausible, and laden with banalities and trite cliches.

Sontag has done an able job of editing [A Barthes Reader], and her introduction is thoughtful, an elegiac retrospective, what in the eighteenth century would have been called an éloge—a commemoration of the illustrious dead. This introduction to Barthes forms the concluding essay in her own selection, A Susan Sontag Reader…. It is quite instructive to read the Barthes and Sontag Readers in tandem; the real thing looks even more real beside the imitation. Sontag's ability to stay ...

Among the world's foremost equivalencers, Susan Sontag is a perpetual curiosity, especially noteworthy for her unequivocal promotion of unlikely equations whose virtues she apparently considers self-evident. In the title of her latest venture, I, etcetera, she manages a truly impressive equilibration. The reference to I is pretty clear, however, the etcetera could mean any number of things, as for instance: I, me, myself and mine; I came, saw, conquered, think therefore etc.; I want-see-say-do-will-c...

Susan Sontag is a [grim] figure, for the idea of alternatives in every possible situation always replaces the bread of life. In her novels as in her essays, she is concerned with producing a startling esthetic which her words prolong. She is interested in advancing new positions to the point of making her clever, surprisingly sustained novels experiments in the trying-out of an idea. One respects these books, even their total intellectual solemnity, because they are entirely manifestations of Sontag'...

In the following review, Maitland agrees with Sontag's assessment in AIDS and Its Metaphors that society views certain diseases as more than physical ailments, but also as social issues centering on the contraction of the disease.

Whatever became of Camp, both High and Low? A few years ago, before the Revolution became the fashion in New York, there was a period when just about all you heard out of our literary marketplace was talk of the virtues of Camp. The utterances of its high priestess Susan Sontag were being greeted with the kind of adulation previously reserved for such critics and sages as W. H. Auden, Marianne Moore, Simone de Beauvoir, and Norman Mailer. For a half-dozen years or so she had all the editors charmed with her...

In the following review, Urbanski writes that the subject matter of Alice in Bed is challenging and interesting but the play suffers from numerous limitations.

In the following review, Dyer judges Sontag as a master of the essay form, praising her work AIDS and Its Metaphors as well as the earlier essay Illness as Metaphor.

Susan Sontag is best known as a critic who has insistently reminded American readers that a vast contemporary world of thought and imagination continues to evolve on the other side of the Atlantic. Whether she is discussing books or movies or philosophical concepts. Sontag finds her apt illustrations, if not her central theme, in the European tradition, especially in France. In this she bears a resemblance to Matthew Arnold whose love affair with Europe gave to his literary and cultural criticism a breadth ...

In the review below, Tonkin suggests how themes in Sontag's career contributed to her writing Alice in Bed.

In the following review, McDonald comments on Sontag's study Regarding the Pain of Others, noting the various potential effects that photographs can produce in modern viewers constantly inundated with images from news sources, advertising, and entertainment.