Latest news with #SusanSontag
Novaya Gazeta Europe
08-07-2025
- Novaya Gazeta Europe
St. Petersburg bookshop charged with promoting ‘LGBT propaganda' — Novaya Gazeta Europe
The popular St. Petersburg bookshop Podpisnye Izdaniya has again been charged with promoting 'LGBT propaganda', independent news outlet Bumaga reported on Tuesday. The court hearing, scheduled for Wednesday, marks the second time that the bookshop has been charged. It was fined 800,000 rubles (€8,700) after being convicted of selling books which promote 'LGBT propaganda' in May. In April, security forces seized dozens of books with LGBT and feminist themes after members of the public reported the store to authorities for selling banned titles. Podpisnye Izdaniya was then handed a list of 48 titles that needed to be removed from the shelves, including books by the late American writer Susan Sontag. Meanwhile, its store manager, Yelena Orlova, was charged with participating in the work of an 'undesirable organisation' and fined 20,000 rubles (€220) for selling the book On the Way to Magadan by Belarusian anarchist writer Ihar Alinevich, which was published with the support of the Anarchist Black Cross, an organisation that the Justice Ministry deemed 'undesirable' in early 2024, independent news outlet Mediazona reported. Opened in 1926, Podpisnye Izdaniya is one of Russia's most famous independent bookshops and it regularly hosts book launches and events. Podpisnye Izdaniya is not the only bookshop to be targeted by authorities this year as a nationwide crackdown on publishing houses and bookshops began in April. Other bookshops, such as independent bookstore Falanster based in Moscow, have also come under scrutiny and been charged with promoting 'LGBT propaganda' while a number of publishing professionals have also been detained.
The Guardian
28-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Blind date: ‘He told me off for looking at my phone'
What were you hoping for? A lot of good food and for the evening not to turn into an edition of Dining Across the impressions? Blond! Blue eyes!What did you talk about? The Bible. Judith Butler. Susan Sontag. Patti LuPone. Poetry. Squash. Musicals. Deciding whether or not to name our Pokémon (I'm pro). The cookbook club I'm in. The scavenger hunt I went on before our date. The awkward moment? When we exchanged numbers, I glimpsed his contact list. The moniker that was above my name is not suitable for publication. (We laughed about it!)Good table manners? Faultless. We ordered lots and shared thing about Eden? He has a poet's you introduce Eden to your friends? Eden in three words Cool, calm and do you think Eden made of you? Probably that I'm excitable and garrulous. He said I was 'erudite'. Blind date is Saturday's dating column: every week, two strangers are paired up for dinner and drinks, and then spill the beans to us, answering a set of questions. This runs, with a photograph we take of each dater before the date, in Saturday magazine (in the UK) and online at every Saturday. It's been running since 2009 – you can read all about how we put it together questions will I be asked?We ask about age, location, occupation, hobbies, interests and the type of person you are looking to meet. If you do not think these questions cover everything you would like to know, tell us what's on your mind. Can I choose who I match with?No, it's a blind date! But we do ask you a bit about your interests, preferences, etc – the more you tell us, the better the match is likely to be. Can I pick the photograph?No, but don't worry: we'll choose the nicest ones. What personal details will appear?Your first name, job and age. How should I answer?Honestly but respectfully. Be mindful of how it will read to your date, and that Blind date reaches a large audience, in print and online. Will I see the other person's answers?No. We may edit yours and theirs for a range of reasons, including length, and we may ask you for more details. Will you find me The One?We'll try! Marriage! Babies! Can I do it in my home town?Only if it's in the UK. Many of our applicants live in London, but we would love to hear from people living elsewhere. How to applyEmail Did you go on somewhere? He had to get up early the next day to go on a boat trip, so we didn't. And … did you kiss? On the street? If you could change one thing about the evening what would it be? Eden was trying to remember one of Stephen Sondheim's songs (Could I Leave You? from Follies). Despite me insisting, he'd only do bits of the tune, and sotto voce, so I could hardly hear him! We'll need to turn the volume up next time. Marks out of 10? 7. Would you meet again? We plan to. What were you hoping for? I would've been happy with a free meal, but I was hoping for a new connection. First impressions? Good hug when I arrived. He wanted to order nearly everything on the menu, so we did, and I liked that. He seemed a bit nervous at first, but I was too, so that wasn't a problem. What did you talk about? Lorde. Mitski. Susan Sontag. Performance poetry. The concept of self-esteem. And a nice bit of gossiping. Most awkward moment? Probably when he told me off for looking at my phone. Good table manners? No criticisms here. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Best thing about Tope? His laugh. I liked his sense of humour; I couldn't predict when he would find something funny, but when he did he really did. Would you introduce Tope to your friends?I would. In fact, I texted a friend on the way home saying I think they'd get on. Describe Tope in three wordsInterested and interesting. What do you think Tope made of you? I think he'd like to get to know me better. I don't think he fancies me that much though. Did you go on somewhere? No, but we stayed talking in the restaurant until very late. And … did you kiss? I never kiss on a first date … If you could change one thing about the evening what would it be? I wouldn't have ordered the prawns. Marks out of 10? 8. Would you meet again? Yes. Tope and Eden ate at Kricket Shoreditch, London EC2. Fancy a blind date? Email
Vogue
10-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Vogue
In a New Volume Out This Fall, Annie Leibovitz Revisits Her Women
'This project was never done,' Annie Leibovitz once said of Women, the landmark book of portraits she created in 1999 with her late partner, Susan Sontag. Speaking to The New York Times nearly two decades later, Leibovitz made clear that the project—then touring the globe as an exhibition—wasn't meant to be finite. 'It's not one of those projects that will ever have an ending.' Making good on that concept, this November, 25 years after its original publication, Women is returning in a new slipcased edition: a two-volume set from Phaidon pairing the original book with an entirely new companion volume of portraits made between 2000 and the present. Together, they offer a sweeping meditation on femininity, power, vulnerability, and the visual vocabulary we use to define all three. Left: Susan Sontag; Right: A showgirl Photo: Courtesy of Phaidon The original Women was a deeply personal endeavor—not only due to Sontag's involvement (she penned the incisive essay that accompanied the imagery), but also because of the reverence with which Leibovitz approached her subjects. The portraits of Louise Bourgeois, Sandra Day O'Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Eileen Collins weren't simply about visibility—they were about legacy. Sontag's text, first excerpted in Vogue in 1999, interrogated the very idea of a book of women's portraits, positing that no such effort for men would be received in the same way. 'But then a book of photographs of men would not be undertaken in the same spirit,' she noted. 'Each of these pictures must stand on its own. But the ensemble says, so this is what women are now.'
The Guardian
04-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Edmund White obituary
Edmund White was present in June 1969 when the police raided the Stonewall Inn, a well-known gay bar in Manhattan, New York. Shouts of 'gay power' were heard as bartenders, hat-check boys and the owners were hauled off in vans. At first it seemed an unexpected laugh, and then the men milling round in the street started to resist the police and their billy clubs. It was the moment when gay militancy was born. White, who has died aged 85, went on to become one of the most prominent gay writers of his generation, but by temperament he was not a blazing militant. His sensibility was that of a midwestern Marcel Proust, and he did not do anger. An evening spent cruising the gay bars, or chatting about the New York literary scene with the gay writers who formed the Violet Quill group, was more his style. He wrote confidently about the experience of gay men, and in 1977 he co-authored The Joy of Gay Sex, a unique pre-Aids guide to sexual practices and etiquette. It appeared at a time when such information was exceptionally hard to find in straight America, and made him, overnight, an inspiration and a scandalous celebrity. He was hardly the first writer confidently to proclaim his sexual identity, but sexual acts between men were then punishable by prison in the US, and 'fag-baiting' had widespread currency. Many gay writers and artists, some of them White's close friends, preferred to remain closeted. The writer Susan Sontag had cautioned White against the inevitable professional suicide of coming out. White's first international bestseller, which did particularly well in Britain, was A Boy's Own Story (1982), an autobiographical novel of a young boy's coming out that traced his own experience with frankness and considerable erotic detail. A year after it was published, with support from the Guggenheim Foundation, and a strong reference from Sontag, who knew the French capital well, White moved to Paris with his then lover James Purcell. He did not return to New York until 1998. Among the attractions of life in Paris was that he did not have to be a professional 'gay novelist', though his social world was dominated by his gay friends there. In 1985, White published Caracole, a novel that contained thinly veiled portraits, not always sympathetic, of Sontag and the poet and translator Richard Howard. It caused a permanent break with Sontag, and was perceived in New York as an ill-tempered settling of scores with former friends. Sontag demanded the removal of her friendly blurb from future editions of A Boy's Own Story. Three years later White published The Beautiful Room Is Empty, a sequel to A Boy's Own Story, about the emotional and erotic entanglements he had known. There seemed to be little other than his romantic and sexual needs to write about, but his detachment from American life was clear: 'I felt a real nausea whenever I faced America's frumpy cuteness.' The Farewell Symphony (1997) completed a trilogy of autobiographical fictions telling the life story of a gay man from childhood to middle age. As a young boy growing up in Cincinnati, and then at Cranbrook academy, a private school near Detroit, White felt intense shame at his sexuality, and spent fruitless years in psychoanalysis looking for a cure. 'I felt intensely lonely as a teenager keeping the terrible secret of my homosexuality,' he wrote in his 2005 autobiography My Lives, which retraced many of the relationships that had appeared somewhat disguised in his earlier books. His father, Edmund White II, a wealthy civil engineer and entrepreneur, was ashamed and outraged at a homosexual son, and one who did not play baseball. In The Beautiful Room Is Empty, he remembered advice from his father: 'I'm not saying you should marry for money. Just make sure the girls you go out with are all rich.' White felt unfathomably 'different' in a world that was aggressively homophobic and threatening to a young man with a yearning for sex, love and affection with men. He wrote of himself in My Lives as 'an overly brainy, nervous kid with knobby elbows and knees, pale blue veins ticking beneath the pale white skin, a long, almost constricted torso'. His mother, Delilah (known in the family as Lila Mae), a Baptist from Texas who converted to Christian Science, was more sensitive but also more emotionally needy; she wanted Eddie nearby. He felt that his mother loved him, without really understanding him. Family life was suffocating. After graduating from the University of Michigan, where he majored in Chinese ('I knew I was a complete fraud,' he later admitted, 'that I couldn't read or write or speak or understand Chinese'), he headed to New York, taking with him the guilt, anxiety and conflicted memories of a deeply unhappy childhood. New York had an established gay bohemian scene, and he relished the city's erotic possibilities. No one used condoms. White got the clap on average once a month and dated his clap doctor. The city then had no gay bookstores, few gay bars, no magazines, agents or publishers interested in gay writing, and so far as he knew there were no readers in the US for gay books. He wrote several novels, which were discouragingly rejected, and, to pay the rent, worked for eight years at Time-Life Books. White read in a cover story in Time magazine in 1966 that homosexuality was a 'pernicious sickness'. Several of his psychoanalysts shared that attitude. He met Howard in 1967 and bemoaned his failure to make any headway with his literary career. Howard read the manuscript of his novel Forgetting Elena (set on an imaginary island domain modelled on the gay resort of Fire Island), made some helpful stylistic suggestions, and managed to interest an editor at Random House in the book. Published in 1973, it received lukewarm praise in the New York Times and sold 600 copies. The British book-packager Mitchell Beazley, who had a phenomenal success with Alex Comfort's The Joy of Sex (8m copies sold worldwide after publication in 1972), commissioned White to do The Joy of Gay Sex. It was frank, unjudgmental and filled with unexpected detail. It did not make him rich, but that kind of visible success opened doors in New York. White was then commissioned by Beazley to write a travelogue of gay America, which appeared as States of Desire in 1980. He was ambivalent about what he had seen of the gay scene across the nation. There was still too much self-hatred in gay life, and he did not particularly like the emerging style of extreme butch masculinisation. Gay men in New York were galvanised into a collective response to the unfolding crisis of Aids in the early 1980s. White attended the meeting at Larry Kramer's apartment in Manhattan on 9 January 1982, when the Gay Men's Health Crisis was formed. Within 16 months GMHC had become the largest Aids service organisation in the world. But White soon detached himself from the intense political struggles on the board and in the ensuing decade maintained a near-total silence about Aids. Many of his friends and lovers died of the disease. His lack of response seemed a manifest failure of his nerve as a writer. In Paris, White seemed comfortable with the expansive role of cultural guide to the city and French writing. His solidly researched biography of Genet, published in 1993 after seven years' research, was greeted with the most unequivocally positive reviews of his career. Appointed Chevalier (later Officier) of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 1993, he received the National Book Critics's Circle award for his Genet, and the David Kessler award from the Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies at City University of New York. This was followed by Our Paris (1994), offering light-hearted sketches of Parisian haunts. An accessible and chatty biographical study of Proust appeared in 1999, followed two years later by The Flaneur, in which he took an agreeable stroll through fondly remembered Parisian scenes. His biography of the symbolist poet Rimbaud appeared in 2008. He was also a classic cultural academician, having been made a member both of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He taught creative writing at Princeton University and other universities and collected his literary essays and reviews in The Burning Library (1994) and Arts and Letters (2004). His vivid memories of New York in the 60s and 70s, the pre-Aids New York of plentiful sex and romantic entanglements, appeared in City Boy (2009); and he chronicled the Paris years in Inside a Pearl (2014). He ranged across his life as a reader of thousands of books in The Unpunished Vice (2018) and as a lover in The Loves of My Life (2025). Two subsequent novels, Fanny, A Fiction (2003) and Hotel de Dream (2007), were amusing historical pastiches, and five more followed, most recently The Humble Lover (2023). White is survived by Michael Carroll, his partner since the 90s, whom he married in 2013. Edmund Valentine White, writer, born 13 January 1940; died 3 June 2025
The Guardian
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Boys by Leo Robson review – a likeable debut with aimless charm
Early on in Leo Robson's debut novel, the narrator, a likable, aimless, rather detached young Londoner named Johnny Voghel, reads 'a book of Susan Sontag essays and interviews'. Johnny's copy of what he later identifies as A Susan Sontag Reader is an heirloom. It has been extensively underlined by his mother, who has just died, and by his estranged half-brother Lawrence. Johnny wonders if reading Sontag, or his family's other heavily annotated books, will 'unlock a secret or hint at one, offer a glimpse of their dreams or invite them into mine'. A Susan Sontag Reader includes Sontag's 1968 defence of Jean-Luc Godard, the great modernist and Marxist provocateur of French New Wave cinema. If Johnny, in search of family connection, happened to read that essay, he would encounter a paragraph that rather neatly describes the novel that he is in the process of narrating. Godard's films, Sontag writes, 'show an interrelated group of fictional characters located in a recognisable, consistent environment: in his case, usually contemporary and urban'. But 'while the sequence of events in a Godard film suggests a fully articulated story, it doesn't add up to one […] actions are often opaque, and fail to issue into consequences'. There is almost always a kind of ulterior quality to the debut novel of a very good critic, stemming perhaps from a willed suppression of all that the critic knows about novels – how they can go wrong, how they must go right. And a very good critic is what Leo Robson is. For years he has been publishing long, formidably intelligent essays and reviews in venues including the New Statesman, the New Yorker and the London Review of Books. He is one of a handful of working critics worth reading not merely for the rigour of his arguments but for the pleasures of his unfailingly witty prose. He is a great articulator of minority opinions, having dared, among recent sallies, to defend the unfashionable oeuvre of Joyce Carol Oates, diss the films of Pedro Almodóvar, and express deep scepticism about Paul Murray's widely beloved The Bee Sting. With such a reputation, the actual production of a first novel could be construed as either reckless or brave. And the fact that The Boys more or less begins with its narrator reading Susan Sontag might perhaps ring alarm bells, not least because Sontag herself, a superb critic, wasn't much cop as a novelist. But one of the interesting things about The Boys is the way in which it both invites and refuses a 'literary' or 'critical' reading. As in Sontag's account of Godard's films, The Boys goes to some trouble to avoid being obviously 'novelistic'. It has no clanging symbols or coy thematic statements. Scenes and even sentences appear ready to lurch toward event, toward meaning, only to collapse abruptly into a bemusing bathos. It is a pottering-about sort of book. It delivers great pleasure, actually, at the level of humble perception, of anticlimax. It does indeed remind you of a French New Wave film – not one of Godard's spiky assaults on bourgeois complacency, but perhaps something gentler by François Truffaut (who is not mentioned) or Eric Rohmer (who is). Setting and period are hyperspecific: certain parts of London, in and around Swiss Cottage, during the 2012 Olympics. (In some ways it's a London-geography novel, a tube-nerd's dream.) The narrator, Johnny, seems to be looking for love – but is he? He has a girlfriend, whom we barely meet, named Chloe. He muses on the history of his family, Viennese Jews who fled to London during the second world war. His older half-brother, Lawrence, is the book's magnetic core: half hooligan, half intellectual, passionate about city planning and social care. Around Lawrence's charismatic instability, the Voghel family revolve and reshuffle their priorities. A plot, sort of: Johnny and Lawrence repair their estrangement; Lawrence's teenage son Jasper is having a baby with his girlfriend LouLou; Johnny, in trying to find Lawrence a job, discovers himself, in the novel's longest section, deeply attracted to two young postgrad students at the university where he works as an administrator, Harvey (male) and Rory (female). This is a bit Jules et Jim, except that it doesn't quite go anywhere. Instead, Robson lets us hang out with his characters until we find ourselves thinking of them as real people. The Boys, in its prose and in its structure, is almost entirely made up of odd kinks of specificity – as are we all, of course, and as is the world. Hardly bothering with the conventions of 'the novel', it nonetheless – or perhaps I mean therefore – creates a mood that is less like fiction and more like life. It is a rather luminous, eccentric and memorable book. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion The Boys by Leo Robson is published by Riverrun (£16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
