SIGNED, AIDS and Its Metaphors, Susan Sontag, Stated First Edition, 1989

New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989. Signed. NF/NF. Stated First Edition. Signed by Susan Sontag on the title page. The book is tight with solid hinges, good tips, and clean unmarred boards. Spine head gently pushed. The textblock has the previous owner's name on endpaper, but clean with no bookplate or markings and not BCE, ex-library, or remaindered. Light toning to endpapers. The dust jacket is unclipped ($14.95) very faint wear to the spine head, Protected in a new Brodart Mylar cover. 95 pages. 5½ x 8½" tall.

The idea behind both “Illness as Metaphor” and “AIDS and Its Metaphors” is that society’s response to diseases that it does not yet understand is to construct fantasies about them. The metaphorical packaging of AIDS, she argues, increases the suffering of the afflicted while creating unneeded anxiety among the population at large. The disease is felt to be obscene, its name becomes a curse, its diagnosis a death sentence.