Susan Sontag

The work of Kafka, for example, has been subjected to a mass ravishment by no less than three armies of interpreters. Those who read Kafka as a social allegory see case studies of the frustrations and insanity of modern bureaucracy and its ultimate issuance in the totalitarian state. Those who read Kafka as a psychoanalytic allegory see desperate revelations of Kafka’s fear of his father, his castration anxieties, his sense of his own impotence, his thralldom to his dreams. Those who read Kafka as a religious allegory explain that K. in The Castle is trying to gain access to heaven, that Joseph K. in The Trial is being judged by the inexorable and mysterious justice of God.

“Never trust the teller, trust the tale

In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe.

grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.

means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power.

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. · Letter from Birmingham Jail
ALLEN GINSBERG · Television Was a Baby Crawling Toward That Deathchamber
DAPHNE DU MAURIER · The Breakthrough
DOROTHY PARKER · The Custard Heart
Three Japanese Short Stories
ANAÏS NIN · The Veiled Woman
GEORGE ORWELL · Notes on Nationalism
GERTRUDE STEIN · Food
STANISLAW LEM · The Three Electroknights
PATRICK KAVANAGH · The Great Hunger
DANILO KIŠ · The Legend of the Sleepers
RALPH ELLISON · The Black Ball
JEAN RHYS · Till September Petronella

FRANZ KAFKA · Investigations of a Dog
CLARICE LISPECTOR · Daydream and Drunkenness of a Young Lady
RYSZARD KAPUŚCIŃSKI · An Advertisement for Toothpaste
ALBERT CAMUS · Create Dangerously
JOHN STEINBECK · The Vigilante
FERNANDO PESSOA · I Have More Souls Than One
SHIRLEY JACKSON · The Missing Girl
Four Russian Short Stories
ITALO CALVINO · The Distance of the Moon
AUDRE LORDE · The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House
LEONORA CARRINGTON · The Skeleton’s Holiday
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS · The Finger
SAMUEL BECKETT · The End
KATHY ACKER · New York City in 1979

CHINUA ACHEBE · Africa’s Tarnished Name
SUSAN SONTAG · Notes on ‘Camp’
JOHN BERGER · The Red Tenda of Bologna
FRANÇOISE SAGAN · The Gigolo
CYPRIAN EKWENSI · Glittering City
JACK KEROUAC · Piers of the Homeless Night
HANS FALLADA · Why Do You Wear a Cheap Watch?
TRUMAN CAPOTE · The Duke in His Domain
SAUL BELLOW · Leaving the Yellow House
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER · The Cracked Looking-Glass
JAMES BALDWIN · Dark Days
GEORGES SIMENON · Letter to My Mother
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS · Death the Barber

BETTY FRIEDAN · The Problem that Has No Name
FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA · The Dialogue of Two Snails
YUKO TSUSHIMA · Of Dogs and Walls
JAVIER MARÍAS · Madame du Deffand and the Idiots
CARSON MCCULLERS · The Haunted Boy
JORGE LUIS BORGES · The Garden of Forking Paths
ANDY WARHOL · Fame
PRIMO LEVI · The Survivor
VLADIMIR NABOKOV · Lance
WENDELL BERRY · Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer

Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described.