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“Once upon a time, men, women and (secretly) children smoked.”
Following the success of Cataract, John Berger, one of the great soothsayers of seeing, joins forces again with Turkish illustrator Selcuk Demirel. This charming pictorial essay reflects on the cultural implications of smoking. A subtle and beautifully illustrated prose poem, Smoke lingers in the mind.
This charming illustrated work reflects on the cultural implications of smoking, and suggests, through a series of brilliantly inventive illustrations, that society’s attitude to smoke is both paradoxical and intolerant. It portrays a world in which smokers, banished from public places, must encounter one another as outlaws. Meanwhile, car exhausts and factory chimneys continue to pollute the atmosphere. Smoke is a beautifully illustrated prose poem that lingers in the mind.
“A cigarette is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis. The time of a cigarette is a parenthesis, and if it is shared you are both in that parenthesis. It’s like a proscenium arch for a dialogue.” – John Berger (in interview)
In contemporary English letters John Berger seems to me peerless. Not since D. H. Lawrence has there been a writer who offers such attentiveness to the sensual world with responsiveness to the imperatives of conscience.
—Susan Sontag
In his ceaselessly inventive work, Selçuk often uses parts of the body in ways that are characteristically Turkish…as if the comedy of the human condition were there in the human body, in the melancholy of anatomy.
—John Berger, on Selçuk Demirel
Smoke
by John Berger (Author)
and Selcuk Demirel (Illustrator)
Hardcover, $18.95
Available in Hardcover on May 8, 2018
ISBN10 1910749478
ISBN13 9781910749470
From Notting Hill Editions
70 pages
new books
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More in: - Book News, Archive A-B, Archive A-B, Archive C-D, Art & Literature News, Illustrators, Illustration, John Berger, Susan Sontag
John Berger (London, November 5, 1926), art critic and author of Ways of Seeing, died in Paris (January 2, 2017)
Berger’s best-known work was Ways of Seeing, a criticism of western cultural aesthetics. His novel G. won the Booker Prize. Half of the prize money Berger donated to the Black Panthers an radical African-American movement.
Berger began his career as a painter. But he also was a storyteller, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, dramatist and critic. He was one of the most internationally influential writers of the last fifty years.
His editor Tom Overton, who is writing John Berger’s biography, has said that the writer Berger “has let us know that art would enrich our lives”.
John Berger was author of: Another Way of Telling, About Looking, Photocopies, The Shape of a Pocket, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos, Selected Essays of John Berger, Pig Earth, Once in Europa, King, Titian, Lilac and Flag, To the Wedding, Here Is Where We Meet, G., Pages of the Wound, Three Lives Of Lucie Cabrol.
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