A fully established American figure, Sontag is ready for the archive; and so, appropriately, we have A Susan Sontag Reader. It's not the Reader—maybe there will be a sequel—but it offers a heavy sampling of her work, from her first novel, The Benefactor (1963), through her obituary essay on Roland Barthes (1981), all selected by Sontag herself. Ordinarily, writers are dead or incapacitated before Readers are bestowed on them. Sontag is neither—though you'd never know it from Elizabeth Hardwick's elegiac introduction [see excerpt above], which croons of "unique talent" and "profound authority" till you can fairly smell the formaldehyde.

There's too much of Sontag's fiction here—a harmless gesture of vanity on its author's part, but an unwelcome reminder to the reader of how dull and derivative that fiction is….

Her nonfiction, however, is always vivacious, even when its polemic is blurry and its impact has grown...