Susan Sontag to Speak at Yale

Novelist, critic, and filmmaker Susan Sontag will speak on “The Art of Fiction: A Reading” at Yale University in the Whitney Humanities Center auditorium, 53 Wall St., on Tuesday, April 8, at 4:30 p.m. She will hold an informal conversation at 8:30 p.m. at Ezra Stiles College, 9 Tower Parkway. Both events are free and open to the public.

Ms. Sontag’s books include three novels, “The Benefactor”, 1963, “Death Kit”, 1967, and “The Volcano Lover”, 1992; a volume of short stories, “I, etcetera”, 1978; a play, “Alice in Bed”, 1993; and six books of essays, including “On Photography”, 1977, “Illness as Metaphor”, 1978, and “AIDS and Its Metaphors”, 1989. Her books have been translated into 23 languages and have won many prizes.

Ms. Sontag has made four feature-length films and directed plays in the United States and Europe, most recently a production of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” in besieged Sarajevo.

A human rights activist for more than two decades, Ms. Sontag served from 1987-1989 as president of the American Center of PEN, an international writers’ organization. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a MacArthur Fellow from 1990-1995. She was named “Officier des Arts et des Lettres” by the French government in 1984, and won the Malaparte Prize in Italy in 1992.

Her new novel, “In America,” will be published in 1998 by Farrar Straus & Giroux.