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Patti Smith

Biography

Patti Smith

Patti Smith is the author of JUST KIDS, which won the National Book Award in 2010; M TRAIN; A BOOK OF DAYS; as well as numerous collections of poetry and essays. Her seminal album Horses has been hailed as one of the top 100 albums of all time. In 2005, the French Ministry of Culture awarded Smith the title of Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres; she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007.

Patti Smith

Books by Patti Smith

by Patti Smith - Memoir, Nonfiction

The most intimate of Patti Smith’s memoirs, BREAD OF ANGELS takes us through her teenage years where the first glimmers of art and romance take hold. Arthur Rimbaud and Bob Dylan emerge as creative role models as she begins to write poetry then lyrics, ultimately merging both into the songs of iconic recordings such as Horses, Wave and Easter. She leaves it all behind to marry Fred Sonic Smith. The couple spend nights charting new adventures as they start a family. Grief and gratitude are braided through years of caring for her children, rebuilding her life and writing again, the one constant in a life driven by artistic freedom. In the final pages, we meet Smith on the road again, the vagabond who travels to commune with herself, who lives to write and writes to live.

by Patti Smith - Memoir, Nonfiction

In 2018, without any plan or agenda for what might happen next, Patti Smith posted her first Instagram photo: her hand with the simple message “Hello Everybody!” Known for shooting with her beloved Land Camera 250, Smith started posting images from her phone, including portraits of her kids, her radiator, her boots and her Abyssinian cat, Cairo. Followers felt an immediate affinity with these miniature windows into Smith’s world. Over time, a coherent story of a life devoted to art took shape, and more than a million followers responded to Smith’s unique aesthetic in images that chart her passions, devotions, obsessions and whims. In wide-ranging yet intimate daily notations, Smith shares dispatches from her travels around the world.

by Patti Smith - Memoir, Nonfiction

Following a run of New Year’s concerts at San Francisco’s legendary Fillmore, Patti Smith finds herself tramping the coast of Santa Cruz, about to embark on a year of solitary wandering. Unfettered by logic or time, she draws us into her private wonderland, in which she debates intellectual grifters and spars with the likes of a postmodern Cheshire Cat. Then, in February 2016, a surreal lunar year begins, bringing unexpected turns, heightened mischief and inescapable sorrow. For Smith --- inveterately curious, always exploring, always writing --- this becomes a year of reckoning with the changes in life’s gyre: with loss, aging and a dramatic shift in the political landscape of America.

by Patti Smith - Memoir, Nonfiction

M TRAIN begins in the tiny Greenwich Village café where Patti Smith goes every morning for black coffee, ruminates on the world as it is and the world as it was, and writes in her notebook. Woven throughout are reflections on the writer’s craft and on artistic creation. Here, too, are singular memories of Smith’s life in Michigan and the irremediable loss of her husband, Fred Sonic Smith. Braiding despair with hope and consolation, illustrated with her signature Polaroids, M TRAIN is a meditation on travel, detective shows, literature and coffee.

by Philippe Margotin, Jean-Michel Guesdon, Scott Freiman, and Patti Smith - Music

ALL THE SONGS delves deep into the history and origins of the Beatles and their music.

by Patti Smith - Autobiography, Music, Nonfiction

In JUST KIDS, Patti Smith’s first book of prose, the legendary American artist offers a never-before-seen glimpse of her remarkable relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in the epochal days of New York City and the Chelsea Hotel in the late '60s and '70s.