A begginer's guide to Patti Smith

The Coral Sea

Patti Smith · 2012

Auguries of Innocence

Patti Smith · 2009

Babel

Patti Smith · 1978

Woolgathering

Patti Smith · 2012

In this small, luminous memoir, the National Book Award-winner Patti Smith revisits the most sacred experiences of her early years, with truths so vivid they border on the surreal. The author entwines her childhood self - and its 'clear, unspeakable joy' - with memories both real and envisioned from her twenties on New York's MacDougal Street, the street of cafés. Woolgathering was completed in Michigan, on Patti Smith's 45th birthday and originally published in a slim volume from Raymond Foye's Hanuman Books. Twenty years later, Bloomsbury is proud to present it in a much augmented edition, featuring writing that was omitted from the book's first printing, along with new photographs and illustrations.

Devotion

Patti Smith · 2017

Year of the Monkey

Patti Smith · 2020

M Train

Patti Smith · 2016

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the National Book Award–winning author of Just Kids: a “sublime collection of true stories … and wild imaginings that take us to the very heart of who Patti Smith is” (Vanity Fair), told through the cafés and haunts she has worked in around the world. Patti Smith calls this bestselling work “a roadmap to my life.”<br/><br/>M Train begins in the tiny Greenwich Village café where 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. Through prose that shifts fluidly between dreams and reality, past and present, we travel to Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul in Mexico; to the fertile moon terrain of Iceland; to a ramshackle seaside bungalow in New York’s Far Rockaway that Smith acquires just before Hurricane Sandy hits; to the West 4th Street subway station, filled with the sounds of the Velvet Underground after the death of Lou Reed; and to the graves of Genet, Plath, Rimbaud, and Mishima.<br/><br/>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.<br/><br/>Braiding despair with hope and consolation, illustrated with her signature Polaroids, M Train is a meditation on travel, detective shows, literature, and coffee. It is a powerful, deeply moving book by one of the most remarkable multiplatform artists at work today.<br/><br/>Featuring a postscript with five new photos from Patti Smith

Just Kids: A National Book Award Winner

Patti Smith · 2010

<p> It was the summer Coltrane died, the summer of love and riots, and the summer when a chance encounter in Brooklyn led two young people on a path of art, devotion, and initiation. </p> <p> Patti Smith would evolve as a poet and performer, and Robert Mapplethorpe would direct his highly provocative style toward photography. Bound in innocence and enthusiasm, they traversed the city from Coney Island to Forty-second Street, and eventually to the celebrated round table of Max's Kansas City, where the Andy Warhol contingent held court. In 1969, the pair set up camp at the Hotel Chelsea and soon entered a community of the famous and infamous—the influential artists of the day and the colorful fringe. It was a time of heightened awareness, when the worlds of poetry, rock and roll, art, and sexual politics were colliding and exploding. In this milieu, two kids made a pact to take care of each other. Scrappy, romantic, committed to create, and fueled by their mutual dreams and drives, they would prod and provide for one another during the hungry years. </p> <p> <i>Just Kids</i> begins as a love story and ends as an elegy. It serves as a salute to New York City during the late sixties and seventies and to its rich and poor, its hustlers and hellions. A true fable, it is a portrait of two young artists' ascent, a prelude to fame. </p>