Listen free for 30 days
-
Against Interpretation and Other Essays
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 12 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged Audiobook
- Categories: Literature & Fiction, Essays
Add to basket failed.
Add to wishlist failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Listen with a free trial
Buy Now for £22.49
No valid payment method on file.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Listeners also enjoyed...
-
Where the Stress Falls
- By: Susan Sontag
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 12 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Thirty-five years after her first collection, the classic Against Interpretation, America's most important essayist chose more than 40 longer and shorter pieces from the previous 20 years. "Reading", the first of three sections, includes ardent pieces on writers from Sontag's own private canon - Machado de Assis, Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Borges, Tsvetaeva, and Elizabeth Hardwick.
-
The White Album
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Susan Varon
- Length: 7 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
First published in 1979, The White Album records indelibly the upheavals and aftermaths of the 1960s. Examining key events, figures, and trends of the era - including Charles Manson, the Black Panthers, and the shopping mall - through the lens of her own spiritual confusion, Joan Didion helped to define mass culture as we now understand it. Written with a commanding sureness of tone and linguistic precision, The White Album is a central example of American reportage and a classic of American autobiography.
-
-
Introspective ally to the external world
- By tamara on 02-11-19
-
Styles of Radical Will
- By: Susan Sontag
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Styles of Radical Will, Susan Sontag's second collection of essays, extends the investigations she undertook in Against Interpretation with essays on film, literature, politics, and a groundbreaking study of pornography.
-
Under the Sign of Saturn
- Essays
- By: Susan Sontag
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 6 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Sontag's most important critical writings from 1972 to 1980 are collected in Under the Sign of Saturn. One of America's leading essayists, Sontag's writings are commentaries on the relation between moral and aesthetic ideas, discussing the works of Antonin Artaud, Leni Riefenstahl, Elias Canetti, Walter Benjamin, and others. The collection includes a variety of her well-known essays. Sontag's writings are famously full of intellectual range and depth, and are at turns exhilarating, ominous, disturbing, and beautiful.
-
Funny Weather
- Art in an Emergency
- By: Olivia Laing
- Narrated by: Sophie Aldred
- Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Funny Weather brings together a career’s worth of Laing’s writing about art and culture, examining its role in our political and emotional lives. She profiles Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georgia O’Keefe, interviews Hilary Mantel and Ali Smith, writes love letters to David Bowie and Freddie Mercury, and explores loneliness and technology, women and alcohol, sex and the body.
-
-
A wonderful inspiring hopeful read
- By Anonymous User on 10-08-20
-
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Diane Keaton
- Length: 6 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Universally acclaimed from the time it was first published in 1968, Slouching Towards Bethlehem has been admired for decades as a stylistic masterpiece. Academy Award-winning actress Diane Keaton (Annie Hall, The Family Stone) performs these classic essays, including the title piece, which will transport the listener back to a unique time and place: the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco during the neighborhood’s heyday as a countercultural center.
-
-
How is this book still relevant?
- By Claire Leith on 28-03-18
-
Where the Stress Falls
- By: Susan Sontag
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 12 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Thirty-five years after her first collection, the classic Against Interpretation, America's most important essayist chose more than 40 longer and shorter pieces from the previous 20 years. "Reading", the first of three sections, includes ardent pieces on writers from Sontag's own private canon - Machado de Assis, Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Borges, Tsvetaeva, and Elizabeth Hardwick.
-
The White Album
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Susan Varon
- Length: 7 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
First published in 1979, The White Album records indelibly the upheavals and aftermaths of the 1960s. Examining key events, figures, and trends of the era - including Charles Manson, the Black Panthers, and the shopping mall - through the lens of her own spiritual confusion, Joan Didion helped to define mass culture as we now understand it. Written with a commanding sureness of tone and linguistic precision, The White Album is a central example of American reportage and a classic of American autobiography.
-
-
Introspective ally to the external world
- By tamara on 02-11-19
-
Styles of Radical Will
- By: Susan Sontag
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Styles of Radical Will, Susan Sontag's second collection of essays, extends the investigations she undertook in Against Interpretation with essays on film, literature, politics, and a groundbreaking study of pornography.
-
Under the Sign of Saturn
- Essays
- By: Susan Sontag
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 6 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Sontag's most important critical writings from 1972 to 1980 are collected in Under the Sign of Saturn. One of America's leading essayists, Sontag's writings are commentaries on the relation between moral and aesthetic ideas, discussing the works of Antonin Artaud, Leni Riefenstahl, Elias Canetti, Walter Benjamin, and others. The collection includes a variety of her well-known essays. Sontag's writings are famously full of intellectual range and depth, and are at turns exhilarating, ominous, disturbing, and beautiful.
-
Funny Weather
- Art in an Emergency
- By: Olivia Laing
- Narrated by: Sophie Aldred
- Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Funny Weather brings together a career’s worth of Laing’s writing about art and culture, examining its role in our political and emotional lives. She profiles Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georgia O’Keefe, interviews Hilary Mantel and Ali Smith, writes love letters to David Bowie and Freddie Mercury, and explores loneliness and technology, women and alcohol, sex and the body.
-
-
A wonderful inspiring hopeful read
- By Anonymous User on 10-08-20
-
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Diane Keaton
- Length: 6 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Universally acclaimed from the time it was first published in 1968, Slouching Towards Bethlehem has been admired for decades as a stylistic masterpiece. Academy Award-winning actress Diane Keaton (Annie Hall, The Family Stone) performs these classic essays, including the title piece, which will transport the listener back to a unique time and place: the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco during the neighborhood’s heyday as a countercultural center.
-
-
How is this book still relevant?
- By Claire Leith on 28-03-18
-
Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors
- By: Susan Sontag
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 4 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1978 Susan Sontag wrote Illness as Metaphor, a classic work described by Newsweek as “one of the most liberating books of its time”. A cancer patient herself when she was writing the book, Sontag shows how the metaphors and myths surrounding certain illnesses, especially cancer, add greatly to the suffering of patients and often inhibit them from seeking proper treatment.
-
Glitch Feminism
- A Manifesto
- By: Legacy Russell
- Narrated by: Janina Edwards
- Length: 3 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The divide between the digital and the real world no longer exists: we are connected all the time. How do we find out who we are within this digital era? Where do we create the space to explore our identity? How can we come together and create solidarity? The glitch is often dismissed as an error, a faulty overlaying, but, as Legacy Russell shows, liberation can be found within the fissures between gender, technology and the body that it creates.
-
-
BRILLIANT
- By Anonymous User on 21-03-21
-
Everybody
- By: Olivia Laing
- Narrated by: Emily Pennant-Rea
- Length: 8 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Embodiment is not an easy business. From violence to illness, sexuality to racism, the fact of a body can be impossibly hard to inhabit. Olivia Laing draws on her own background in protest and alternative medicine to investigate the reasons why. Laing’s exploration of the complexities of bodily life takes in some of the most significant and beguiling figures of the past century, among them the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, the painters Francis Bacon and Agnes Martin and the singer and civil rights activist Nina Simone.
-
-
Fab book, average narrator
- By Lisa on 07-07-21
-
The Lonely City
- Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
- By: Olivia Laing
- Narrated by: Zara Ramm
- Length: 8 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
What does it mean to be lonely? How do we live, if we're not intimately engaged with another human being? How do we connect with other people? When Olivia Laing moved to New York City in her mid-30s, she found herself inhabiting loneliness on a daily basis. Fascinated by the experience, she began to explore the lonely city by way of art. Humane, provocative and deeply moving, The Lonely City is about the spaces between people and the things that draw them together, about sexuality, mortality and the magical possibilities of art.
-
-
Disappointed
- By Ms. Natasha Baste.... on 29-08-18
-
Debt - Updated and Expanded
- The First 5,000 Years
- By: David Graeber
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 17 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Here, anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom: He shows that before there was money, there was debt. For more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods - that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors.
-
-
Hmmmmmmm. Interesting.
- By Mr on 13-11-19
-
The Art of Cruelty
- A Reckoning
- By: Maggie Nelson
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 8 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Today both reality and entertainment crowd our fields of vision with brutal imagery. The pervasiveness of images of torture, horror, and war has all but demolished the 20th-century hope that such imagery might shock us into a less alienated state, or aid in the creation of a just social order. What to do now? When to look, when to turn away? Genre-busting author Maggie Nelson brilliantly navigates this contemporary predicament, with an eye to the question of whether or not focusing on representations of cruelty makes us cruel.
-
The Existential Actor
- Life and Death Onstage and Off
- By: Jeff Zinn
- Narrated by: Jeff Zinn
- Length: 6 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This is a book for the thinking actor, and the finest actors I've known are just that. The best actors bring it all together: body, heart, spirit, and mind. A theory of acting, if true, shows us to ourselves. Jeff Zinn knows this. He knows it as an actor, director, teacher, and thinker. His theory of everything is simple and revelatory.
-
-
A must read for all serious actors.
- By KatieHargreavesArt on 27-10-17
-
Sister Outsider
- Penguin Modern Classics
- By: Audre Lorde
- Narrated by: Pippa Bennett-Warner
- Length: 6 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The revolutionary writings of Audre Lorde gave voice to those 'outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women'. Uncompromising, angry and yet full of hope, this collection of her essential prose - essays, speeches, letters, interviews - explores race, sexuality, poetry, friendship, the erotic and the need for female solidarity and includes her landmark piece 'The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House'.
-
-
Audre Lorde, my prophet
- By Amazon Customer on 26-07-21
-
Wanderlust
- A History of Walking
- By: Rebecca Solnit
- Narrated by: Liisa Ivary
- Length: 13 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
What does it mean to be out walking in the world, whether in a landscape or a metropolis, on a pilgrimage or a protest march? In this first general history of walking, Rebecca Solnit draws together many histories to create a range of possibilities for this most basic act. Arguing that walking as history means walking for pleasure and for political, aesthetic, and social meaning, Solnit homes in on the walkers whose everyday and extreme acts have shaped our culture.
-
-
Wanderlust
- By Mike Browne on 17-01-20
-
Death's End
- By: Cixin Liu
- Narrated by: Bruno Roubicek
- Length: 29 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Half a century after the Doomsday Battle, the uneasy balance of Dark Forest Deterrence keeps the Trisolaran invaders at bay. Earth enjoys unprecedented prosperity due to the infusion of Trisolaran knowledge, and, with human science advancing and the Trisolarans adopting Earth culture, it seems that the two civilizations can coexist peacefully as equals, without the terrible threat of mutually assured annihilation. But peace has made humanity complacent.
-
-
Mind. Officially. Blown.
- By htspider on 13-07-20
-
Testaments Betrayed
- By: Milan Kundera
- Narrated by: Graeme Malcolm
- Length: 7 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Milan Kundera has established himself as one of the great novelists of our time with such books as The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Immortality and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. In Testaments Betrayed, he proves himself a brilliant defender of the moral rights of the artist and the respect due to a work of art and its creator's wishes. The betrayal of both - often by their most passionate proponents - is the principal theme of this extraordinary work.
-
Feel Free
- Essays
- By: Zadie Smith
- Narrated by: Nikki Amuka-Bird
- Length: 13 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The one and only Zadie Smith, prize-winning, best-selling author of White Teeth, is back with a second unmissable collection of essays. No subject is too fringe or too mainstream for the unstoppable Zadie Smith. From social media to the environment, from Jay-Z to Karl Ove Knausgaard, she has boundless curiosity and the boundless wit to match. In Feel Free, pop culture, high culture, social change and political debate all get the Zadie Smith treatment, dissected with razor-sharp intellect.
-
-
Fascinating
- By Philip on 21-01-19
Summary
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 famous 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.
More from the same
What listeners say about Against Interpretation and Other Essays
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Pat Kaufman
- 17-02-22
Performance
Strident, polemical, high pitched voice that made listening impossible.
Recommend a more mature reader for the text as this one has a little girl’s twang with self-conscious earnestness.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story

- Dulce Mattos
- 14-08-19
Against interpretation, like, literally.
Sontag's ideas are way more spirituous than this interpretation by Tavia Gilbert. Not only that, but an additional detail: this narrator doesn't pronounce french properly and, since Sontag cites lots of french authors and ouvres, this fact takes me away from the listening every time the opportunity rises.
9 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story

- john burke
- 20-11-20
Excellent Essays Hurt By Labored Narrator
I just don't get this narrator. It's almost like she's trying to channel Susan Sontag but Sontag spoke in an assured, even tone.....This Tavia Gilbert makes her sound somehow snobbish and unsure of herself. She really clings to the sound ending a sentence....maybe this is for enunciation but comes across labored, irritating and untrue to Sontag's speaking style.
I've listened to Jennifer Van Dyck's reading on Sontag's journals and "On Photography". Audible PLEASE HAVE THESE RE-RECORDED with Jennifer Van Dyck.
7 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story

- Fiammetta Rey
- 26-02-22
Worthwhile as a historical document?
She wrote from a place of looking at a world where things were just starting to open up in certain ways, and her perspective a lot of the time seems to be “wait, is this really as open as you think it is? Is it really possible to live without those traditional restrictions, or were our ancestors right that those restrictions are hard-baked into the fabric of the universe?”
In a time some 50-60 years later where more things have opened up, but people — intellectually limited people who have never lived outside of America and Europe, never lived outside of the dominance of the tyranny of YHWH-worshippers — are still asking the same questions, doubting whether or not openness is really possible, these essays seem restrictive.
On the other hand, no one asks deep questions at all anymore. They just live their lives with a fake façade of openness when deep down, they’re terrified of anything outside of the cultural boundaries they’ve been taught.
1 person found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story

- Pinklotuspolo
- 28-02-22
Distracting Reader serious writing
Sontag is smart and her writing will get your gears turning. The French was difficult to understand which was annoying
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story

- jdk
- 21-07-21
Sublime Sontag
In Against Interpretation Susan Sontag delivers a series of essays and reviews in her inimical, prolix style. It is an avalanche of focused free association punctuated with francophone, continental, cinephile references, philosophy, psychology, art and erudition.
There is little pause for a reader as her dancing mind leaps and pirouettes across themes and categories without detailed definition or stepwise argument. Keep Up! is always the imperative.
Forefend interpretation, her words are a revelation of her art, a sensibility of a mind. Awesome.
Her thoughts on race, culture, anthropology and the writing of James Baldwin failed to persuade, and may even offend in it's callous immaturity and doublespeak. The Shoa is attrocity; 20th century colonial genocide of Amazonian indigenes is "extinction". Regarding the Pain of Other provides, perhaps, a revaluation of her prejudice.