Papierosy – book

The more anti-smoking captions and pictures fill up the space of a cigarette packet, the more often I quit smoking. It’s not about the message of heart disease, impotence, and painful death, but about the aesthetics: I can’t stand the lack of respect for graphic design. After all, such a circle on Lucky Strikes is a masterpiece. Or the camel of Camels, the dancer on a pack of Gitanes, the whole Marlboro lettering.

Papierosy is a story that feeds on fire. Episodes, snapshots, and traces of memory carefully pieced together form a personal story, filtered through mass imagination, emigration, and historical breakthroughs. This book, written for over a dozen years – only in periods when the Author was quitting smoking – tells a story straight back from the brink. It brings testimonies of many personal defeats, but one belief too – in freedom, which is like breathing.