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Just Kids

Patti Smith

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Just Kids
 

Marketing Campaign

•National Television Campaign
•National Radio Campaign
•Radio Satellite Tour
•National Print Features and Reviews
•Author Appearances in New York
•Featured in the Hot@Harper Newsletter
•Academic and Library Marketing, Including Galley Mailings
•Online Advertising and Outreach, Including E-cards, Targeting Fans of Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe
 
 

Patti Smith

Patti Smith is a writer, artist and performer. Her seminal album Horses was followed by nine releases including Radio Ethiopia, Easter, Dream of Life, Gone Again, and Trampin’. Her art work was first exhibited at Gotham Book Mart in 1973, and she has been associated with the Robert Miller Gallery since 1978. Strange Messenger, a retrospective of 300 works, made its debut at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and has been exhibited world-wide, most notably at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, Haus der Kunst, Munich, and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Her books include Witt, Babel, Woolgathering, The Coral Sea, Patti Smith Complete 1975–2006, and Auguries of Innocence. On July 10, 2005, she received the Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the highest grade awarded by the French Republic to eminent artists and writers who have contributed significantly to furthering the arts throughout the world.

Smith resides in New York City and is the mother of two, Jackson and Jesse.



 

Backlist

Auguries of Innocence
Auguries of Innocence
Patti Smith
  • Trade PB
  • 9780060832674
  • 6/10/2008
  • $15.95 ($19.99 Can.)
  • Marketing Code: AV
Patti Smith Complete 1975-2006
Patti Smith Complete 1975-2006
Patti Smith
  • Trade PB
  • 9780060849719
  • 4/25/2006
  • $25.95 ($33.99 Can.)
  • Marketing Code: AV
 

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Extras


Quotes

"One of the best things I've ever read in my life."


- Don Imus
"Tenderly evocative...it makes perfect sense for [Smith] to use a memoirist's sleight of hand...to recapture an eager, fervent and wondrously malleable young spirit. It also makes sense for her to cast off all verbal affectation and write in a strong, true voice unencumbered by the polarizing mannerisms of her poetry."


- Janet Maslin, New York Times
"JUST KIDS concerns the early years of their passionate friendship, a time that coincided with the beginning of the end of Manhattan's last great bohemian age, when a couple with dreams of beatnik glory could live on day-old bread and cigarettes and paint fumes, all of which Smith evokes so precisely that one can smell the Nescafé boiling on a hot plate...More than a 1970s bohemian rhapsody, JUST KIDS is one of the best books ever written on becoming an artist- not the race for online celebrity and corporate sponsorship that often passes for artistic success these days, but the far more powerful, often difficult journey toward the ecstatic experience of capturing radiance of imagination on a page or stage or photographic paper. Jesus may have died for somebody's sins, but Patti Smith lives and writes and sings for all of us."


- Washington Post
"Smith's intimate memoir is a tender elegy for the man with whom she had a two-decade-long relationship...Just Kids is astonishing on many levels, most notably for Smith's lapidary prose...As a primer on self-discovery and the artist's journey, "Just Kids" is as inspiring as Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. It reminds us that becoming an artist is a worthwhile and brave endeavor....There's no need to ghettoize this book by praising it as an impressive memoir by a famous musician. It is simply one of the best memoirs to be published in recent years: inspiring, sad, wise and beautifully written."


- San Francisco Chronicle
"A heartbreakingly sweet recollection of just that sort of vanished Bohemian life...Just as [Smith] stands out as an artiste in a movement based on collectivism, her singular voice gleams among rock memoirs as a work of literature."


- Boston Globe
"[Smith] gives us vivid snapshots of the people who offered the young artists encouragement and support...Her tender and evenhanded evocation of two driven innocents searching for voices of their own offers a welcome counterbalance to more lurid and sensational portraits of the late Mapplethorpe found elsewhere...this gently illuminating book earns a place alongside her best poems and songs."


- Detroit Free Press
"An utterly charming, captivating, intimate portrait of a late 1960s and early 1970s period of intense artistic ferment in downtown Manhattan significantly shaped and keenly observed by rock firebrand Smith...Just Kids presents a poet-rocker recounting the salad days in a clear, commanding prose voice that's recognizably her own, but not quite so mysterious and mystical as the one heard in the music...Just Kids is a sweet story of two luminously talented outsiders awkwardly finding their way, together."


- Philadelphia Inquirer
"The most compelling memoir by a rock artist since Bob Dylan's 'Chronicles: Volume One,' written with intimacy and grace, filled with revelation about a romance that might seem inscrutable to anyone but the two who were once so passionate about each other and remained so passionate about each other's work."


- Chicago Tribune
"A moving portrait of the artist as a young woman, and a vibrant profile of Smith's onetime boyfriend and lifelong muse, Robert Mapplethorpe, who died of AIDS in 1989...JUST KIDS is ultimately a wonderful portal into the dawn of Smith's art."


- Los Angeles Times
"The reckless, splendid circus of New York's royal bohemia in the 1960s and '70s-rock idols, cowboy poets, Warhol Superstars-surrounds Smith in her heady recounting of a halcyon era. But the heart of Just Kids, a captivating memoir, is the lifelong love affair (first romantic, later creative and platonic) between Smith and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, before she became music's punk poet laureate and he one of the art world's most provocative and controversial figures. In her inimitable, lyrical style, Patti Smith recalls the pair's coming together as young, monumentally broke dreamers: ''just kids.'' What follows is both a poignant requiem (Mapplethorpe died of AIDS at age 43) and a radiant celebration of life. Grade: A."


- Entertainment Weekly
"A shockingly beautiful book...a classic, a romance about becoming an artist in the city, written in a spare, simple style of boyhood memoirs like Frank Conroy's 'Stop Time.'"


- New York Magazine