Over the last couple of years, American writer and intellectual, Susan Sontag, has been experiencing a “rediscovery,” as evidenced by Benjamin Moser’s 2019 biography of Sontag (the subject of this conversation with Sheila Heti), as well as the much talked about 2019 Met exhibition, Camp: Notes on Fashion, that took as its theme Sontag’s highly influential 1964 essay “Notes on Camp.” And as part of the podcast series, Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA, TPL released its own four-part episode of Sontag herself talking in 2001 with Evan Solomon at the International Festival of Authors (now called TIFA) to celebrate the release of her book, In America. This is the conversation that Sheila Heti references when this conversation here with Ben Moser begins and Heti exclaims that she “she was so fierce, she was so terrifying, and I've never forgotten it, all these years…” Benjamin Moser is the author of Sontag: A Life. Moser was born in Houston. He is the author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book. For his work bringing Clarice Lispector to international prominence, he received Brazil’s first State Prize for Cultural Diplomacy. He has published translations from French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch. A former books columnist for Harper's Magazine and The New York Times Book Review, he has also written for The New Yorker, Conde Nast Traveler, and The New York Review of Books. Sheila Heti is the author of eight books of fiction and nonfiction, including Motherhood, How Should a Person Be? which was a New York Times Notable Book and was named a best book of the year by The New Yorker. She is co-editor of the New York Times bestseller Women in Clothes, and is the former Interviews Editor for The Believer magazine. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The London Review of Books, The Paris Review, McSweeney's, Harper's, and n+1.