Patti Smith has 6 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 4 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.7★ across 172 ratings. The most-rated is Just Kids.
Just Kids
Summary
National Book Award, Nonfiction, 2010 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 42nd 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 60s and 70s 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.
©2010 Patti Smith (P)2011 Patti Smith
Year of the Monkey
Summary
Riveting, elegant, and humorous, New York Times best seller Year of the Monkey is a moving and original work, a touchstone for our turbulent times. 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 listener: her wisdom, wit, gimlet eye, and above all, a rugged hope for a better world. Named one of NPR’s Best Books of the Year - now including a new chapter, "Epilogue of an Epilogue" - Year of the Monkey “reminds us that despair and possibility often spring from the same source” (Los Angeles Times).
©2019 Patti Smith (P)2019 Random House Audio
M Train
Summary
From the National Book Award-winning author of Just Kids: an unforgettable odyssey of a legendary artist told through the prism of the cafés and haunts she has worked in around the world. It is a book Patti Smith has described as "a road map to my life". 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, and across a landscape of creative aspirations and inspirations, we travel to Frida Kahlo's Casa Azul in Mexico; to a meeting of an Arctic explorer's society in Berlin; to a ramshackle seaside bungalow in New York's Far Rockaway, which Smith acquires just before Hurricane Sandy hits; 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, 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.
©2015 Patti Smith (P)2015 Random House Audio
Devotion
Summary
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 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' 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 cafe 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.
©2017 Patti Smith (P)2018 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Cutie and the Beast
Summary
Book one in the new Fae Out of Water series. Temp worker David Evans has been dreaming of Dr. Alun Kendrick ever since that one transcription job for him, because holy cats, that voice. Swoon. So when his agency offers him a position as Dr. Kendrick’s temporary office manager, David neglects to mention that he’s been permanently banished from offices. Because, forgiveness? Way easier than permission. Alun Kendrick, former Queen’s Champion of Faerie’s Seelie Court, takes his job as a psychologist for Portland’s supernatural population extremely seriously. Secrecy is paramount: No non-supe can know of their existence. So when a gods-bedamned human shows up to replace his office manager, he intends to send the man packing. It shouldn’t be difficult - in the 200 years since he was cursed, no human has ever failed to run screaming from his hideous face. But cheeky David isn’t intimidated, and despite himself, Alun is drawn to David in a way that can only spell disaster: When fae consort with humans, it never ends well. And if the human has secrets of his own? The disaster might be greater than either of them could ever imagine.
©2017 E.J. Russell (P)2020 E.J. Russell
Just Kids
Summary
Patti Smith führt uns in das New York der frühen Siebzigerjahre, in eine Ära, die für sie vor allem von der tiefen Freundschaft zu einem Menschen geprägt wird: dem später zu Weltruhm gelangten Fotografen Robert Mapplethorpe. "Just Kids" erzählt die bewegende Geschichte zweier Seelenverwandter, die für und durch die Kunst leben, und entwirft zugleich ein betörendes Bild einer revolutionären Epoche. Als Patti Smith und Robert Mapplethorpe sich im Sommer 1967 in New York kennen lernen, sind sie beide 23 und ohne einen Pfennig in der Tasche auf der Suche nach einem freien Leben als Künstler. Eine intensive Liebesgeschichte beginnt, die später in eine tiefe Freundschaft übergeht. Von Brooklyn ziehen sie ins Chelsea Hotel, wo Patti Smith Bekanntschaft macht mit Janis Joplin, Allen Ginsberg, Sam Shepard, Todd Rundgren, Tom Verlaine und vielen anderen Künstlern. Patti Smith taucht ein in die Welt der Rockmusik und wird zu einer der einflussreichsten und stilprägendsten Künstlerinnen des Jahrzehnts. Auch wenn sich ihre Wege zwischendurch trennen, bleiben Patti und Robert bis zu dessen Tod im Jahr 1989 eng verbunden. "Just Kids", halb Elegie, halb Romanze, entwirft ein so noch nicht gesehenes Bild einer aufregenden Epoche und besticht durch die Offenheit, Wärme, den feinen Humor und die große sprachliche Kraft, mit der Patti Smith erzählt. Radikal, zärtlich und unverwechselbar eigen ist hier die Künstlerin Patti Smith als Schriftstellerin zu entdecken.
©2010 Kiepenheuer & Witsch (P)2010 tacheles! / ROOF Music