Susan Sontag: The Complete Rolling Stone Interview

American writer, journalist and Rolling Stone editor Jonathan Cott recorded this candid and intellectually rich conversation with Susan Sontag in Paris and New York in 1978. Of the twelve hours of conversation, only fragments were originally published in the magazine, while the rest remained inaccessible even to English-speaking readers for decades. The complete version was finally published in English in 2013, and now, nearly fifty years after their meeting, it is finally available in Ukrainian.

Their conversation moves through personal experiences of illness and death, the ideas of Marcel Proust and Friedrich Nietzsche, the music of Patti Smith and Chuck Berry, the contrasts between New York and Los Angeles. Sontag reflects on how rock’n’roll changed her life, how philosophical texts shape the way we perceive culture and why for her there is no divide between intellect and emotion.

The translation was brilliantly done by Yaroslava Strikha — translator, literary critic and Harvard University PhD.