The smoking book / Lesley Stern.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Stern, Lesley.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Cigarette smokers--Fiction.

Cigarette smokers.

Tobacco use--Fiction.

Tobacco use.

Smoking--Fiction.

Smoking.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (252 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

The Smoking Book is a dreamlike structure built on the solid foundation of two questions: how does it feel to smoke, and what does smoking mean? Lesley Stern, in an innovative, hybrid form of writing, muses on these questions through intersecting stories and essays that connect, expand, and contract like smoke rings floating through the air. Stern writes of addictions and passionate attachments, of the body and bodily pleasure, of autobiography and cultural history. Smoking is Stern's seductive pretext, her way of entering unknown and mysterious regions. The Smoking Book begins with intimate and vivid accounts of growing up on a tobacco farm in colonial Rhodesia, reminiscences that permeate subsequent excursions into precolonial tobacco production and postcolonial life in Zimbabwe, as well as dramatic vignettes set in Australia, the United States, Scotland, Italy, Japan, and South America. Stern has written a book, at once intensely personal and kaleidoscopically international, that weaves the intimate act of a solitary person smoking a cigarette into a broad cultural picture of desire, exchange, fulfillment, and the acts that bind people together, either in lasting ways or through ephemeral encounters. The Smoking Book is for anyone who has ever smoked or loved a smoker (against their better judgment); it is for those who have never smoked or for those who mourn the loss of cigarettes as they would grieve for a lost friend. But mostly, The Smoking Book is for all those who are smoldering still.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Smoke Circles

Burnout

Suspended Forever

A Fishy Smell

Not Wan

Burial

Like a Precious Gem

Yakandanda

The Body Has a Mind of Its Own

White Man

Translation (a gift of opium)

No Substitute

Seasickness

Screaming

To Bubble and Rumble (like an elephant)

Memory Missiles

A Smoky Edifice (implosion)

Babies or Booze (metonymy)

Bombs or Bums (metaphor)

Traced by (a slight sense of) Bitterness

Instead of a Lobotomy (a cigarette)

To Remember (to find yourself in fragments)

To Forget

Chaos

Smoko

Black Hole Spinning (the physics of writing)

Healthy

Strange Attractors

A Lycanthropic Age (the writing cure)

A Boil About to Burst (the talking cure)

Voicing

Mouthing

Appetite

Lions Don't Smoke

Poison

Fog Drinking

Kettle Logic (the art of separation)

I Done a Lotta Bad Things

The Smoking Room

Kindness (or, the werewolf comes home)

Those Places in the Body That Have No Language Either

Anticipation (a crevice opening up)

Habit

Panic

A Sleeping Problem

Open Arms

Fire Escape

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

ISBN:

9786611430429

9780226773322

0226773329

9781281430427

1281430420

OCLC:

476229768