Death Kit - by Susan Sontag (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

First published in 1967, Death Kit--Susan Sontag's second novel--is a classic of modern fiction. Blending realism and dream, it offers a passionate exploration of the recesses of the American conscience.

Review Quotes

"In Death Kit Susan Sontag has written a terrifying black novel with the fierce unsettling thrust of a Kafka-esque fable. It is a truly awesome book, forged from a stark in which staccato sentences and near-documentary observations are fused into a brilliantly sustained style." --Boston Globe

"It seems an impertinence merely to recommend this book for its literary qualities. Death Kit is an experience beyond definition, part novel, part thriller, part philosophy, part dream." --Douglas M. Davis, The National Observer

"Death Kit is a strange and wonderful book, a ritual exorcising of modern terrors, a dream book of love and death . . . Sontag conjures up scenes of sordid everyday life that are as brutal and macabre as anything in Raymond Chandler or Nathaniel West." --Frederic Tuten, Vogue

"This novel is 'real art'--disconcerting, absorbing, entertaining (in the Greek sense of the verb; to grip), and extremely unnerving. One can only say, in the most direct way: read it." --Doris Grumbach

"Death Kit . . . is a powerful visionary novel and a remarkable achievement. Miss Sontag has written an extraordinary novel, a Kafka-ish nightmare of an American Jederman, which proclaims at once her soaring talent and her profound pessimism." --John Barkham, Saturday Review

About the Author

Susan Sontag is the author of four novels, The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America (winner of the 2000 National Book Award for Fiction). She has also published a collection of stories, several plays, and five works of nonfiction, among them On Photography and, most recently, Where the Stress Falls. Her books have been translated into twenty-eight languages. In 2001 she was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work.