Critic and essayist Susan Sontag isn't really someone you think of as an author of fiction, but she did write a few novels (notably The volcano lover and In America) as well as eleven rather diverse short pieces of writing that can't quite be classified as essays or reviews and thus seem to have been filed almost by accident in the "fiction" pile. Eight of these appeared previously in a 1978 collection called I, etcetera; this posthumous Collected stories adds "Pilgrimage" and "The letter scene", which don't seem to have been published in book form before, and "The way we live now", which was published as a standalone book in 1991. (Irritatingly, although the Collected Stories has a short general introduction by Benjamin Taylor, it doesn't have any details about the publishing history of the stories at all.)

There's a huge range of forms and subject-matter going on here. "Pilgrimage" is a lovely, presumably autobiographical, story of the acute embarrassment for a clever teenager in 1940s Los Angeles of being taken, against her will, to meet her absolute literary hero, Thomas Mann. Of course the narrator has grown up — didn't we all? — listening to Stravinsky and Schoenberg and reading Joyce, Kafka and Dostoevsky, but Dr Mann seems to think that American high school students are going to want to talk about Hemingway, a writer she's barely even heard of...

"The letter scene" and "Doctor Jekyll" are reimaginings of Pushkin and RLS, respectively, but each is taken from a very strange angle, and it doesn't really help much to be familiar with the original. "Project for a trip to China" and "Unguided tour" are both travel stories, with the first being an account of a trip the narrator hasn't made yet (and a reflection on the offstage death of her father) whilst the second is a kind of cubist composite view of all the travel fiction you've ever read.

"American spirits" and "The dummy" are — marginally — more normal pieces of satirical fantasy-writing; "Baby", a series of monologues set in a psychotherapist's office, seems to be another cubist composite image until you get to the poignant ending; "Debriefing" is a sad but also oddly upbeat little piece about depression in the city, and of course "The way we live now", which originally appeared in the New Yorker in 1986, was Sontag's fictional treatment of the AIDS crisis, told entirely in indirect speech and never mentioning either the name of the patient or that of the disease.

Magnificent writing, sometimes quite obscure and needing a bit of work, but always worth pursuing. And the book would be worth having just for "Pilgrimage". ( )