Name: Bread of Angels: A Memoir
Price: 329.00 ZAR
Availability: InStock
Author: Patti Smith
ISBN: 9798217154241

Type

Physical Book

Author

Patti Smith

Publisher

Penguin

Year

2025

Language

English

Pages

288

Format

Paperback

Dimensions

20.066 x 13.462 x 1.778 cm

ISBN13

9798217154241

Bread of Angels: A Memoir

Patti Smith (Author) · Penguin · Paperback

Cheaper New Book Imported to South Africa

Delivery: 17 Sep - 25 Sep

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Synopsis "Bread of Angels: A Memoir"

A radiant new memoir from artist and writer Patti Smith, author of the National Book Award winner Just Kids

“God whispers through a crease in the wallpaper,” writes Patti Smith in this moving account of her life. A post–World War II childhood unfolds in a condemned housing complex where we enter the child’s world of the imagination. Smith, the captain of her loyal and beloved sibling army, vanquishes bullies, communes with the king of tortoises, and searches for sacred silver pennies.

The most intimate of Smith’s memoirs, Bread of Angels takes us through her teenage years where the first glimmers of art and romance take hold. Arthur Rimbaud and Bob Dylan emerge as creative role models as she begins to write poetry then lyrics, ultimately merging both into the songs of iconic recordings such as Horses, Wave, and Easter.

She leaves it all behind to marry her one true love, Fred Sonic Smith, with whom she creates a life of devotion and adventure on a canal in St. Clair Shores, Michigan. Here, she invents a room of her own, a low table, a Persian cup, inkwell and pen, entering at dawn to write. The couple spend nights in their landlocked Chris-Craft studying nautical maps and charting new adventures as they start a family.

A series of profound losses mark her life. Grief and gratitude are braided through years of caring for her children, rebuilding her life and, finally, writing again—the one constant in a life driven by artistic freedom and the power of the imagination to transform the commonplace into the magical, and pain into hope. In the final pages, we meet Smith on the road again, the vagabond who travels to commune with herself, who lives to write and writes to live.

Patti Smith

(Author)

View Author's Page

Patti Smith (Chicago, 1946) is a writer, singer, and visual artist. She gained significant recognition in the 1970s with the spread of her poetry and rock music. She has released twelve albums, including Horses, considered one of the top hundred of all time by Rolling Stone magazine. Smith held her first drawing exhibition at the Gotham Book Mart in 1973, was represented by the Robert Miller Gallery for three decades, and her retrospective exhibitions have taken place at the Andy Warhol Museum, the Cartier Foundation, and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. Among her books, it is worth highlighting the story of her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe: Just Kids (Lumen, 2010), awarded the National Book Award, Witt, Babel, Woolgathering (Lumen, 2014), The Coral Sea (Lumen, 2012), Auguries of Innocence (Lumen, 2019), M Train (Lumen, 2016), Devotion (Lumen, 2018), Year of the Monkey (Lumen, 2020), and Book of Days (Lumen, 2023). In 2005, the French Minister of Culture awarded her the title of Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres, the highest honor given to an artist by the French Republic. She was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2007. Smith married musician Fred Sonic Smith in Detroit in 1980. They had a son, Jackson, and a daughter, Jesse. The author, who in 2020 received the Pen America Literary Service Award, resides in New York.

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