About this item

In America is a kaleidoscopic portrait of America on the cusp of modernity. As she did in her enormously popular novel The Volcano Lover, Susan Sontag casts a story located in the past in a fresh, provocative light to create a fictional world full of contemporary resonance. In a group of Poles led by Maryna Zalezowska, Polands greatest actress, emigrate to the United States and travel to California to found a utopian commune. When the commune fails, Maryna stays, learns English, andas Marina Zalenskaforges a new, even more triumphant career on the American stage, becoming a diva on par with Sara Bernhardt. In America is about many things a womans search for self-transformation the fate of idealism a life in the theater the many varieties of love and, not least of all, stories and storytelling itself.



About the Author

Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag was born in Manhattan in 1933 and studied at the universities of Chicago, Harvard and Oxford. She is the author of four novels, a collection of stories, several plays, and six books of essays, among them Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. Her books are translated into thirty-two languages. In 2001 she was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work, and in 2003 she received the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. She died in December 2004.



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