Your cart is empty

©2025 Fable Group Inc.
4.0 

Against Interpretation

By Susan Sontag
Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

Includes the essay "Notes on Camp," the inspiration for the 2019 exhibition Notes on Fashion: Camp at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Against Interpretation
was Susan Sontag's first collection of essays and is a modern classic. Originally published in 1966, it has never gone out of print and has influenced generations of readers all over the world. It includes the groundbreaking essays "Notes on Camp" and "Against Interpretation," as well as her impassioned discussions of Sartre, Camus, Simone Weil, Godard, Beckett, Levi-Strauss, science-fiction movies, psychoanalysis, and contemporary religious thought.

This edition has a new afterword, "Thirty Years Later," in which Sontag restates the terms of her battle against philistinism and against ethical shallowness and indifference.

Download the free Fable app

app book lists

Stay organized

Keep track of what you’re reading, what you’ve finished, and what’s next.
app book recommendations

Build a better TBR

Swipe, skip, and save with our smart list-building tool
app book reviews

Rate and review

Share your take with other readers with half stars, emojis, and tags
app comments

Curate your feed

Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communities
app book lists

Stay organized

Keep track of what you’re reading, what you’ve finished, and what’s next.
app book recommendations

Build a better TBR

Swipe, skip, and save with our smart list-building tool
app book reviews

Rate and review

Share your take with other readers with half stars, emojis, and tags
app comments

Curate your feed

Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communities

Against Interpretation Reviews

4.0
“<div>some were phenomonal, and some just didnt interest me unfortunately. there is no doubt sontag is one of the greatest writers ever though.</div>”
“Against Interpretation and Other Essays feels like a dispatch from the front lines of thought, alive, sharp, and still unsettling decades after it was written. Sontag’s essays move between art, literature, film, and philosophy with this effortless intensity, as if she’s both interrogating culture and in love with it at the same time. She argues that we’ve become too obsessed with what things mean, always digging for metaphor, for message, and have forgotten to actually feel them. Her call to “recover our senses” feels radical even now, an invitation to experience art as sensation first and analysis second. Whether she’s writing about Godard or camp or the allure of photography, she’s teaching you how to look again, harder, closer, and more honestly. What’s so striking about this collection is how fresh it still feels. Sontag’s essays don’t sit on the page like artifacts; they spark, provoke, and sometimes gently mock the reader into paying attention. Her language is exact but playful, her intellect unshowy and electric. You get the sense of someone thinking in real time, alive to contradiction, never afraid to change her mind mid-sentence. Reading Against Interpretation today feels like sitting across from the kind of friend who refuses to let you be lazy about your opinions, who reminds you that curiosity is a muscle, not a mood. It’s not just a collection of essays; it’s an instruction manual for how to stay awake to the world.”

Start a Book Club

Start a public or private book club with this book on the Fable app today!

FAQ

Do I have to buy the ebook to participate in a book club?

Why can’t I buy the ebook on the app?

How is Fable’s reader different from Kindle?

Do you sell physical books too?

Are book clubs free to join on Fable?

How do I start a book club with this book on Fable?

Error Icon
Save to a list
0
/
30
0
/
100
Private List
Private lists are not visible to other Fable users on your public profile.
Notification Icon
©2025 Fable Group Inc.
Fable uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB