WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

Reading rocker Smith's account of her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, it's hard not to believe in fate. How else to explain the chance encounter that threw them together, allowing both to blossom? Quirky and spellbinding. -- People

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.

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.

Just Kids 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.

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.

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. It is a powerful, deeply moving book by one of the most remarkable multiplatform artists at work today.

Featuring a postscript with five new photos from Patti Smith

Devotion shows rather than tells what it means to give a life to writing. --Katherine Cooper, Hyperallergic

A work of creative brilliance may seem like magic--its source a mystery, its impact unexpectedly stirring. How does an artist accomplish such an achievement, connecting deeply with an audience never met? In this groundbreaking book, one of our culture's beloved artists offers a detailed account of her own creative process, inspirations, and unexpected connections.

Patti Smith, a National Book Award-winning author, first presents an original and beautifully crafted tale of obsession--a young skater who lives for her art, a possessive collector who ruthlessly seeks his prize, a relationship forged of need both craven and exalted. She then takes us on a second journey, exploring the sources of her story. We travel through the South of France to Camus's house, and visit the garden of the great publisher Gallimard where the ghosts of Mishima, Nabokov, and Genet mingle. Smith tracks down Simone Weil's grave in a lonely cemetery, hours from London, and winds through the nameless Paris streets of Patrick Modiano's novels. Whether writing in a café or a train, Smith generously opens her notebooks and lets us glimpse the alchemy of her art and craft in this arresting and original book on writing.

The Why I Write series is based on the Windham-Campbell Lectures, delivered annually to commemorate the awarding of the Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prizes at Yale University.

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Variety, Pitchfork, PopSugar

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, photographs of her daily coffee, the books she's reading, the graves of beloved heroes--William Blake, Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, Simone Weil, Albert Camus. 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. Original to this book are vintage photographs: anniversary pearls, a mother's keychain, and a husband's Mosrite guitar. Here, too, are photos from Smith's archives of life on and off the road, train stations, obscure cafés, a notebook always nearby. In wide-ranging yet intimate daily notations, Smith shares dispatches from her travels around the world.

With over 365 photographs taking you through a single year, A Book of Days is a new way to experience the expansive mind of the visionary poet, writer, and performer. Hopeful, elegiac, playful--and complete with an introduction by Smith that explores her documentary process--A Book of Days is a timeless offering for deeply uncertain times, an inspirational map of an artist's life.

Hundreds of rarely seen images by legendary photographer Lynn Goldsmith offer an intimate portrait of rock 'n' roll icon Patti Smith during a transformative moment in her career. Images of Smith performing on stage combine with candid behind-the-scenes photographs and striking studio shoots to create a deeply personal look at the singer during her rise to fame. The photographs include Smith's life-changing accident while on tour in 1977 and the aftermath, as well as closeup, empathetic portraits that reveal Smith's self-assurance, her defiance of cultural norms, and her effortless poise. This poignant visual narrative is punctuated throughout by Smith's original poetry and song lyrics.

This book is both a glimpse into a fabled time in music history, documenting a young artist creating what turned out to be a revolutionary work, as well as a celebration of an enduring partnership between two close friends who continue to be creative collaborators to this day.

Patti Smith's National Book Award-winning memoir, now richly illustrated with new material and never-before-seen photographs

Reading rocker Smith's account of her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, it's hard not to believe in fate. How else to explain the chance encounter that threw them together, allowing both to blossom? Quirky and spellbinding. -- People

Patti's Smith's exquisite prose is generously illustrated in this full-color edition of her classic coming-of-age memoir, Just Kids. New York locations vividly come to life where, as young artists, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe met and fell in love: a first apartment in Brooklyn, Times Square with John and Yoko's iconic billboard, Max's Kansas City, or the gritty fire escape of the Hotel Chelsea. The extraordinary people who passed through their lives are also pictured: Sam Shepard, Harry Smith, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg. Along with never-before-published photographs, drawings, and ephemera, this edition captures a moment in New York when everything was possible. And when two kids seized their destinies as artists and soul mates in this inspired story of love and friendship.

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.

Taking us from California to the Arizona desert, from a Kentucky farm to the hospital room of a valued mentor, Smith melds the western landscape with her own dreamscape in a haunting, poetic blend of fact and fiction. As a stranger tells her, Anything is possible. After all, it's the Year of the Monkey. But as Smith heads toward a new decade in her own life, she offers this balm to the reader: her wisdom, wit, gimlet eye, and above all, a rugged hope for a better world.

Including a new chapter, Epilogue of an Epilogue, and ten new photos, Year of the Monkey reminds us that despair and possibility often spring from the same source (Los Angeles Times).

Devotion is short enough to devour at one enjoyable sitting and thought-provoking enough to deserve re-reading.--Suzi Feay, Financial Times

Devotion shows rather than tells what it means to give a life to writing.--Katherine Cooper, Hyperallergic

A work of creative brilliance may seem like magic--its source a mystery, its impact unexpectedly stirring. How does an artist accomplish such an achievement, connecting deeply with an audience never met? In this groundbreaking book, one of our culture's beloved artists offers a detailed account of her own creative process, inspirations, and unexpected connections.

Patti Smith, a National Book Award-winning author, first presents an original and beautifully crafted tale of obsession--a young skater who lives for her art, a possessive collector who ruthlessly seeks his prize, a relationship forged of need both craven and exalted. She then takes us on a second journey, exploring the sources of her story. We travel through the South of France to Camus's house, and visit the garden of the great publisher Gallimard, where the ghosts of Mishima, Nabokov, and Genet mingle. Smith tracks down Simone Weil's grave in a lonely cemetery, hours from London, and winds through the nameless Paris streets of Patrick Modiano's novels. Whether writing in a café or on a train, Smith generously opens her notebooks and lets us glimpse the alchemy of her art and craft in this arresting and original book.

The Why I Write series is based on the Windham-Campbell Lectures, delivered annually to commemorate the awarding of the Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prizes at Yale University.

Auguries of Innocence is the first book of poetry from Patti Smith in more than a decade. It marks a major accomplishment from a poet and performer who has inscribed her vision of our world in powerful anthems, ballads, and lyrics. In this intimate and searing collection of poems, Smith joins in that great tradition of troubadours, journeymen, wordsmiths, and artists who respond to the world around them in fresh and original language. Her influences are eclectic and striking: Blake, Rimbaud, Picasso, Arbus, and Johnny Appleseed. Smith is an American original; her poems are oracles for our times.

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

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.

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.

Just Kids 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.

Initially published in 1998, Patti Smith's Complete Lyrics was a testimony to her uncompromising poetic power. Now, on the fortieth anniversary of the release of Horses, Smith's groundbreaking album, Collected Lyrics has been revised and expanded with more than thirty-five additional songs and liberally illustrated with original manuscripts of lyrics from Smith's extensive archive.

Patti Smith's work continues to retain its relevance, whether controversial, political, romantic, or spiritual. Collected Lyrics offers forty-five years of song, an enduring commemoration of Smith's unique contribution to the canon of rock and roll.

PATTI SMITH is a life coach and retired attorney living in Southern Utah. Her memoir shares life lessons through inspiring stories about her son Christopher, who was born with Down syndrome. Patti is a self-admitted recovering perfectionist and overachiever who has dedicated her life to learning and personal transformation. When not writing, she enjoys traveling and spending time with her six exceptional children.

Although advised by her doctor to place her son in an institution because of his Down syndrome diagnosis, the author looked into her new baby's beautiful eyes and knew she never could. She thought she would dedicate her life to teaching her child, but was delighted to discover how he would teach and change her.

More than a memoir, this book is a primer about the transformative power of acceptance, empathy and unconditional love. Through heartwarming, funny and inspirational true stories, the author shares insights gained as she learned to look at life through her son's perspective. These stories illustrate how joy and valuable opportunities can emerge when letting go of fear and leaning into the unknown.

Using principles of personal improvement and transformation, the author draws universal and eye-opening life lessons from unexpected and profound experiences with her son, Christopher Higgins, whom she respectfully refers to as Professor Higgins, her master teacher.

Unexpected Lessons From Professor Higgins is an inspirational and humorous memoir that follows a mother-and-son journey through the trials and joys of life with Down syndrome. Author Patti Smith lovingly and honestly reveals transformative lessons gleaned from forty-plus years of caring for (and being tutored by) her son, Christopher, whose diagnosis as a baby at first tilted her world off-axis, only to reveal itself, as the years went by, to be the thing that actually set her worldview at the exact right angle.

How was a boy who might otherwise live a life of invisibility to the world end up singing and dancing on stage as the brother of Elvis, speak Chinese without taking any courses, become the star of the show, and get medical treatment for Vulcan issues from Dr. Spock (Star Trek)? Throughchapters/lessons which relate hilarious, poignant, soul-stirring, and sometimes heartbreaking stories, Patti shows how challenges are made to be overcome, expectations are made to be surpassed, love is made to be unconditional, and that each person has unique abilities to lift humankind and change the world.

Although she initially thought her son didn't have the IQ to teach her much when he was born, and was ready and willing to spend her life coaching and teaching him, Patti shares how she was dramatically changed by Christopher's teachings about matters of the heart, of the soul and of the human family.

Masterfully interweaving a witty sense of humor, Patti turned what could easily have been a somber recounting into a genuinely enjoyable and uplifting book that is more than a charming memoir. It balances what could be a sensitive and sometimes sad topic-that of tackling life with a disabled child-while navigating the complexities of challenging events with clever wit and levity.

Anyone seeking enlightenment or amusement from life's provocations will enjoy this book, particularly family members impacted by having a child with developmental challenges or all who could grow by leaning into the unexpected. Patti explains that her transformation by the lessons her son offered allowed her to take the seriousness and hardships of life down a notch -to see and enjoy life through her son's perspectives of acceptance, love and happiness.

Referring to her son as her master teacher, Patti learned to see life through his perspective and discover the joy in situations requiring her to dig deeply into her own psyche to identify beliefs needing adjustment. She shares those changes with vulnerability and light-heartedness, while giving credit to her clever son who is respectfully referred to as her own Professor Higgins.

It's 1941, and the chill of something evil is spreading around the world like a black plague. Suspicion and fear have replaced the trust of innocence of humankind. The news of unheard-of violence and brutality presses heavily on the hearts of mankind. What is tomorrow going to look like? What has happened to the world as we once knew it? World War II begins its escalation, extending its chaos in all directions, including the outer shores of America, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Annie Elizabeth Jordan (known to most as Cricket) can't make any sense of the turbulence that is swirling around her life. This thing called war, newspapers headlines that are hidden from her, the heartache, the fears of loved ones all around her are very disturbing, and no one seems to want to explain it all to her. She is looking forward to her annual visit with her grandparents, who live in the Northwestern United States. This summer will be slightly different than past visits, for she will be traveling on her own, because her mom is on travel restriction due of the baby that is to arrive in the early fall. The death, the murder of one of the children in Cricket's neighborhood, sends more than a shock wave through the town. Nothing like this has ever happened before. Who could have done such a horrific thing? Who living among them could be so evil? It is beyond explanation to Cricket, but she would soon see her grandfather, a retired lawyer and judge, untangle this twisted scenario with its many suspects and astonishing conclusion.

From the National Book Award-winning author of Just Kids and M Train, a profound, beautifully realized memoir in which dreams and reality are vividly woven into a tapestry of one transformative year.

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 with no design, yet heeding signs--including a talking sign that looms above her, prodding and sparring like the Cheshire Cat. In February, a surreal lunar year begins, bringing with it unexpected turns, heightened mischief, and inescapable sorrow. In a stranger's words, Anything is possible: after all, it's the Year of the Monkey. For Smith--inveterately curious, always exploring, tracking thoughts, writing--the year evolves as one of reckoning with the changes in life's gyre: with loss, aging, and a dramatic shift in the political landscape of America.

Smith melds the western landscape with her own dreamscape. Taking us from California to the Arizona desert; to a Kentucky farm as the amanuensis of a friend in crisis; to the hospital room of a valued mentor; and by turns to remembered and imagined places, this haunting memoir blends fact and fiction with poetic mastery. The unexpected happens; grief and disillusionment set in. But as Smith heads toward a new decade in her own life, she offers this balm to the reader: her wisdom, wit, gimlet eye, and above all, a rugged hope for a better world.

Riveting, elegant, often humorous, illustrated by Smith's signature Polaroids, Year of the Monkey is a moving and original work, a touchstone for our turbulent times.