UNITED STATES AUTHOR · BIOGRAPHY · TEXTS
Patti Smith
Also known as: Patricia Lee Smith, PATTI SMITH
Patti Smith is an American singer, songwriter, poet, painter and author who became an influential component of the New York City punk rock movement with her 1975 debut album Horses. Called the "punk poet laureate", Smith fused rock and poetry in her work. On November 17, 2010, Smith won the National Book Award for her memoir Just Kids.
,,Ich mag das Wort, schockierend` nicht
— from Robert Mapplethorpe
Most acclaimed
Robert Mapplethorpe
A revised and updated edition of the most comprehensive survey published of Mapplethorpe's photography. Robert Mapplethorpe was one of the twentieth century's most important and influential artists, known for his groundbreaking and provocative work. He studied painting, drawing, and sculpture in Brooklyn in the 1960s and started taking photographs when he acquired a Polaroid camera in 1970. This comprehensive monograph is an overview of the artist's black-and-white photography of floral still lifes, nudes, selfportraits, and portraits, among other subjects-and also includes a selection of his color images.
M train
M Train is a journey through eighteen "stations." It begins in the tiny Greenwich Village cafâe 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 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 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 memoir, augmented by black-and-white Polaroids taken by Smith herself.
Songs
1997
This completely revised second edition of The Poetic Debussy contains the most recent discoveries in the composer's oeuvre, including a number of hitherto unknown songs. The texts of all of Debussy's songs, both in the original French and with revised English translations on the facing page, are collected in chronological order, with notes and location of sources. In addition, Margaret Cobb has brought together a fascinating selection of Debussy's letters which have poetic references, and has updated the notes on those twenty-six compositions based on or inspired by literary texts. This work will prove an invaluable aid to performers, scholars and students, as it contains the texts, with translation, of the full output of Debussy's songs, describes his works derived from literary sources, and includes important background material.