A pictoral essay by the great art critic, novelist and long-time smoker, John Berger, and Turkish writer and illustrator Selcuk Demirel. "Once upon a time, men, women and (secretly) children smoked." 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)

"Patience, patience, because the great movements of history have always begun in those small parenthesis that we call 'in the meantime.'" --John Berger The last book that John Berger wrote was this precious little volume about time titled What Time Is It?, now posthumously published for the first time in English by Notting Hill Editions. Berger died before it was completed, but the text has been assembled and illustrated by his longtime collaborator and friend Sel uk Demirel, and has an introduction by Maria Nadotti. What Time Is It? is a profound and playful meditation on the illusory nature of time. Berger, the great art critic and Man Booker Prize-winning author, reflects on what time has come to mean to us in modern life. Our perception of time assumes a uniform and ceaseless passing of time, yet time is turbulent. It expands and contracts according to the intensity of the lived moment. We talk of time "saved" in a hundred household appliances; time, like money, is exchanged for the content it lacks. Berger posits the idea that time can lengthen lifetimes once we seize the present moment. "What-is-to-come, what-is-to-be-gained empties what-is."

Nominee for the 2012 Silver Birch Express Award in the Ontario Library Association's Forest of Reading Program. Jeremiah Birnbaum is stinking rich. He lives in a house with nine bathrooms, a games room, an exercise room, an indoor pool, a hot tub, a movie theater, a bowling alley and a tennis court. His parents, a former hotdog vendor and window cleaner who made it big in dental floss, make sure Jeremiah goes to the very best private school, and that he takes lessons in all the things he will need to know how to do as an accomplished and impressive young man: etiquette lessons, ballroom dancing, watercolor painting. And, of course, classical piano. Jeremiah complies, because he wants to please his parents. But one day, by chance, he hears the captivating strains of a different kind of music -- the strums, plucks and rhythms of a banjo. It is music that stirs something in Jeremiah's dutiful little soul, and he is suddenly obsessed. And when his parents forbid him to play one, he decides to learn anyway -- even if he has to make the instrument himself.

What happens when cataracts rob an art critic of his sight? John Berger, whose classic book Ways of Seeing has been in print for fifty years, joins forces with Turkish illustrator Selcuk Demirel to reflect on his own experience of loss of vision. 'John Berger writes about what is important, not just interesting. In contemporary English letters he seems to me peerless; not since Lawrence has there been a writer who offers such attentiveness to the sensual world.' Susan Sontag.