Debriefing

The first complete collection of the late Sontag’s stories affirms both the range and depth of her literary gifts. The volume adds three previously uncollected works, all first published in the New Yorker, to the eight collected as I, Etcetera in 1978. Among the new stories, “Pilgrimage” is a straightforward semiautobiographical narrative—a rarity for Sontag—that chronicles a California teenager’s awkward visit to iconic author Thomas Mann. Less conventionally shaped, “The Letter Scene” fuses instances of letter-writing from the arts, the news, and the narrator’s memory into a haunting meditation on love, time, and distance both physical and psychic. “The Way We Live Now” follows an unnamed man with an unnamed disease (that is clearly AIDS) through a sequence of discussions between his friends. First published in 1986, the story pays compelling witness to both its historical moment and the timeless mystery of suffering. Among previously collected works, “Debriefing,” “Project for a Trip to China,” and “Unguided Tour” in particular stand out for their fierce imaginative and intellectual power. Sontag’s best short fiction is sometimes overlooked because her essays and novels are so strong; this new collection is testament to the fact that, though she did not write short stories often, she wrote them well. (Nov.)