Cigarettes Are Sublime

Klein, Richard

ISBN 10: 0822314010 / ISBN 13: 9780822314011

Published by Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, 1994

About this Item

Second printing, 1994; inscribed and signed by the author on the title page. The author admits only a fool or an academic would write a book on cigarettes--he's the latter, a Cornell prof. The book is unmarked; slight spine slant; corners sharp, tail of spine bumped. The dust jacket is not priced; Brodart protected.

Seller Inventory # 014968

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Cigarettes Are Sublime
• Publisher: Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina
• Publication Date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822314010
• ISBN 13: 9780822314011
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Near Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)

About this title

Synopsis

Cigarettes are bad for you; that is why they are so good. With its origins in the author’s urgent desire to stop smoking, Cigarettes Are Sublime offers a provocative look at the literary, philosophical, and cultural history of smoking. Richard Klein focuses on the dark beauty, negative pleasures, and exacting benefits attached to tobacco use and to cigarettes in particular. His appreciation of paradox and playful use of hyperbole lead the way on this aptly ambivalent romp through the cigarette in war, movies (the "Humphrey Bogart cigarette"), literature, poetry, and the reflections of Sartre to show that cigarettes are a mixed blessing, precisely sublime.

About the Author

Richard Klein is Professor of French at Cornell University and editor of Diacritics. He quit smoking while writing Cigarettes Are Sublime and has been nicotine-free ever since.