On the evening of June 26, Granta Books celebrated the publication of two new books: Fishing in Utopia by Andrew Brown and Swimming in a Sea of Death by David Rieff. Sigrid Rausing, the publisher of Granta magazine, spoke on what these books mean to her.You may well wonder what David Rieff’s book about the death of his mother, Susan Sontag, and Andrew Brown’s book about Sweden have in common,
It was impossible even to tell her...that I loved her because to have done so would have been to say:
'You're dying.'
The Guardian has printed an extended excerpt from David Rieff's memoir,
While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects)– a material vestigate of its subject in a way that no painting can be… Having a photograph of Shakespeare would be like having a nail from the True Cross.
-Susan Sontag
“A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stencilled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.”Susan Sontag (1933 - 2004) U.S. novelist and essayist