In America

SUSAN SONTAG is the author of three other novels, The Benefactor, Death Kit, and The Volcano Lover; I, etcetera, a collection of stories; several plays; and five works of nonfiction, among them On Photography and Illness as a Metaphor & AIDS and Its Metaphors.She lives in New York City.REVIEW: "A tour de force....a magical accomplishment by an alchemist of ideas and words, images and truth." (Michael Pakenham, The Baltimore Sun)REVIEW: "In America displays Sontag in a relaxed, pleasure-seeing mode, guiding her characters through a long travelogue in time, specifically the beginnings of the gilded age in the brave new world." (Paul Gray, Time)REVIEW: "Inspired....In America [is] a counter-romance, alternately hilarious and tragic." (Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair)REVIEW: "[In America] has an invigorating spaciousness....packed with characters, incidents, and color, and combining mass appeal with high intelligence." (Walter Kirn, New York magazine)REVIEW: "Enough incident, psychology, local color and fascinating detail to stock a flotilla of popular novels, a couple of 'Ragtimes' and a brace of theatrical memoirs." (Michael Silverblatt, Los Angeles Times Book Review)REVIEW: "What is wonderful about the book is....[the] counterpoint of novelist and essayist, of innocence and knowingness.From the knowingness comes another excellence of In America, its cat's cradle of meanings." (Joan Acocella, The New Yorker)REVIEW: "Vividly inquisitive....An exhilarating journey into the past, freighted with dazzling detail, the product of an endlessly inquisitive, historical imagination." (The Economist)