Under the Sign of Saturn and I, Etcetera, by Susan Sontag (Vintage, £6.99 each in UK)

The first of these is a series of essays, the second a collection of short stories. The essays deal searchingly with figures such as Barthes, Antonin Artaud, Canetti and Walter Benjamin, as well as with broader issues such as Fascism, and Sontag's brilliance as a dialectician is never in doubt. Her rather stream of consciousness fiction is not everybody's taste, and personally I like her literary journalism and criticism much better, but Sontag is formidably many sided and in all her aspects she demands to be taken seriously.