Today's guest is the author, Benjamin Moser, who is the biographer of not one, but two larger than life writers, one of them being the Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector and the other being the American public intellectual, Susan Sontag. I came across Clarice Lispector when I read her last novel, The Hour of the Star, published in 1977, shortly before her death. It's got a really unusual style and a bit of a weird structure, but there was something quite fascinating about it. 

Benjamin Moser has not only written an excellent biography about Clarice called Why This World, but he was also appointed as the editor for a new English translation of the Complete Works by this author, which has been a major force in the revival of her work. Benjamin then went on to write a biography of Susan Sontag, published in 2019, which won the Pulitzer Prize for best biography. I'd only read one book by Susan Sontag called Against Interpretation, which is a collection of her cultural commentary essays in 1966, which firmly established her as a cultural high priestess in the U.S. for many decades. It's a brilliant book, but it has a certain prickliness. And as you will learn from Benjamin Moser's biography, Sontag: Her Life and Work, Susan, albeit brilliant and influential on public intellectual discourse was perhaps a tricky character in private. So having read both of those excellent biographies, I was curious to discuss the biographical process and genre with Benjamin Moser to understand more about how she worked, what the actual process was, and what motivated him to write these biographies. 

Find more information on Benjamin Moser books: 

Why This World: https://amzn.eu/d/9ycVJtR

Sontag: Her Life and Work: https://amzn.eu/d/8WCfviU

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