Saturn's Awakening Author: Susan Sontag Translator: Yao Junwei Publisher: Shanghai Translation Publishing House

This book is one of Sontag's most famous critical collections, including seven of the most important critical texts published by the writer between 1972 and 1980. In the book, the writer misses Goodman, discusses Artaud's "cruel drama", analyzes Canetti's religiosity, discusses Barthes' aesthetic consciousness, appreciates Benjamin's melancholy poetry, and discusses Riefenstahl and Syberberg's films.

The title of the collection is taken from an article of the same name in the book, which is derived from astrology. According to Benjamin, the subject of the biography, Saturn is "a planet full of twists and turns, delays and stays". Sontag then used "Saturn temperament" to describe the spiritual outlook of thinkers represented by Benjamin. In addition to Benjamin, this collection also deeply comments on the works of thinkers and artists such as Artaud, Barthes, and Canetti, who she regarded as role models and colleagues, and vividly portrayed their spiritual portraits. Sontag's comments on others have thus become a kind of spiritual autobiography of herself.

Susan Sontag, Simone de Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt are considered the most important female intellectuals in the contemporary West. She is a famous "new intellectual" in the United States, known as "the conscience of the American public" and "the first critic on both sides of the Atlantic." She won the National Book Award in 2000, the Jerusalem International Prize for Literature in 2001, the Prince of Asturias Literature Award in Spain and the German Book Award - the German Book Trade Peace Prize in 2003.