Where the Stress Falls: Essays - Tapa dura

It's nearly 40 years since Sontag published Against Interpretation, her influential (and still in print) collection of critical essays. Since then she has written novels, whilst continuing to work as a fine critic. Where the Stress Falls gathers together pieces on such writers as Borges, Barthes, W G Sebald and Joseph Brodsky - as well as others on film, photography, dance, travel writing, translation, and on directing Beckett in war-torn Sarajevo. What links together these and other pieces is Sontag's continuing passion for serious and groundbreaking art. The book itself is hardly as groundbreaking as Against Interpretation. In fact her commitment to such qualities as 'nobility' in writing and filmmaking is distinctly old-fashioned - though hardly the worse for that, in these almost always interesting and sometimes beautifully written essays.

Records a great American writer's urgent engagement with some of the most significant aesthetic and moral issues of the late twentieth century, and provides a brilliant and clear-eyed appraisal of what is at stake, in this new century, in the survival of that inheritance.