M Train
| Category: | Book |
| By (author): | Smith, Patti |
| Subject: | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Artists, Architects, Photographers |
| BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / General | |
| BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs | |
| LITERARY CRITICISM / Books & Reading | |
| Publisher: | Knopf Random Vintage Canada |
| Published: | October 2015 |
| Format: | Book-hardcover |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Size: | 8.17in x 5.42in x 0.95in |
- Availability:
- Unavailable
Bookshelf comment
Not only is Patti Smith an amazing musician and visual artist but she is also a wizard with words. Her first autobiographical volume Just Kids set an amazing story of people who are now famous wandering in the desert of their youth. In this new volume she describes 17 settings which have made her life into a creative wonderland!
Additional Notes
| From The Publisher* | From the National Book Award-winning author of Just Kids: an unforgettable odyssey into the mind of this legendary artist, told through the prism of cafés and haunts she has visited and worked in around the world. M Train is a journey through seventeen "stations." It 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. We then travel, through prose that shifts fluidly between dreams and reality, past and present, across a landscape of creative aspirations and inspirations: from Frida Kahlo's Casa Azul in Mexico, to a meeting of an Arctic explorer's society in Berlin; from the ramshackle seaside bungalow in New York's Far Rockaway that Smith buys just before Hurricane Sandy hits, to the graves of Genet, Plath, Rimbaud and Mishima. Woven throughout are reflections on the writer's craft and on artistic creation, alongside signature memories, including of her life in Michigan with her husband, guitarist Fred Sonic Smith, whose untimely death was an irremediable loss. For it is loss, as well as the consolation we might salvage from it, that lies at the heart of this exquisitely told memoir, one augmented by stunning black-and-white Polaroids taken by Smith herself. M Train is a meditation on endings and on beginnings: a poetic tour de force by one of the most brilliant, multi-platform artists at work today. |
| Review Quote* | Praise for Just Kids: "[A] lovely and loving, at times sweet, at times harrowing, evocation of a long-vanished/never-to-recur era when two penniless youngsters of the working-class, armed only with talent, dreams and a knack for shoplifting, could bunk up in New York's Chelsea Hotel ('a doll's house in the Twilight Zone') and make a boho go of it. . . . [A] remarkably clear-eyed, often amusing reminiscence." The Globe and Mail "A masterpiece . . . a book so honest and pure as to count as a true rapture." Joan Didion "One of the best books ever written on becoming an artist. . . . Jesus may have died for somebody's sins, but Patti Smith lives and writes and sings for all of us." The Washington Post "This enchanting book is a reminder that not all youthful vainglory is silly; sometimes it's preparation. Few artists ever proved it like these two." Tom Carson, The New York Times Book Review |
| Biographical Note | PATTI SMITH is the author of Just Kids, which won the National Book Award in 2010, and of five collections of poetry. 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. |