Where the Stress Falls gathers essays from the last decades of Sontag’s career, moving between literature, theatre, film, photography and politics.

It sprawls from Danilo Kiš to contemporary Chinese writers, but the preoccupation is consistent. Sontag always sought to show how serious art survives within spectacle, nationalism, and distraction.

She writes as a reader first — alert to style, translation, exile — and as a public intellectual wary of simplification.