Devotion
(Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read)
The National Book Award-winning author of Year of the Monkey, Just Kids, and M Train offers a rare, intimate account of her own creative process.
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's 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 café 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.
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Patti Smith. (2017). Devotion. Yale University Press.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Patti Smith. 2017. Devotion. Yale University Press.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Patti Smith, Devotion. Yale University Press, 2017.
MLA Citation (style guide)Patti Smith. Devotion. Yale University Press, 2017.
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Patti Smith is a writer, performer, and visual artist. Her memoir Just Kids received a National Book Award, and her recent book M Train is a critically acclaimed New York Times best-seller. Smith was awarded the prestigious title of Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres by the French Republic, and in 2007 she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Smith lives in New York City.
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The National Book Award-winning author of Year of the Monkey, Just Kids, and M Train offers a rare, intimate account of her own creative process.
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's 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 café 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.- seriesId
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July 24, 2017
Musician and author Smith (M Train) tries her hand at that most meta of projects: writing a book about writing. This is no craft manual, however; instead, her slim volume contains a single novella bookended by a pair of personal reflections on the tale’s genesis (she’s inspired to write about a discourse between “a sophisticated, rational man and a precocious, intuitive girl”): among the reflections are her descriptions of a trip to Paris while obsessing over Simone Weil and Soviet deportations; a remembered photograph taken decades before; and wood carvings, seen on a visit to the home Albert Camus, that Camus bought with his Nobel Prize money. The lesson is obvious: that a writer draws on every detail of his or her life for the alchemical, often unconscious process of creation. But seeing the process in action is a profound experience. Smith’s writing in the essays is as beautifully structured as her poetry, so the novella’s mundanity comes as something of a shock: an orphaned young girl with an obsession for ice skating is stalked, groomed, and abused by an older man, and both meet tragic ends. Smith’s writing about her novella is much more thoughtful and captivating than the novella itself.
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July 15, 2017
Much-honored rock goddess and writer Smith (M Train, 2015, etc.) returns with a hurried meditation on miscellaneous deep things, including the title topic.Where Just Kids (2010) was alive with bohemian exuberance and M Train was one long product-placement vehicle, the latest seems like a knocked-off magazine piece for some vaguely spiritual enterprise. At the core of this slender volume, part of the publisher's Why I Write series, is a love story, of sorts, concerning an Estonian skater who bears more than a passing resemblance to the young Horses-era Smith: "She was small with porcelain skin and thick dark hair with severely cut fringe." Every idea she has of herself is in complete relation and devotion to skating; "I excelled in school," she intones, "yet nothing before skating gave me the tools to express the inexpressible." Naturally, the unflinching Eugenia had to make a tough choice, and guess what she stopped doing? In memoir-ish vignettes bracketing this story, Smith writes of the French martyr Simone Weil, to whom she directs a poem with a rather awful couplet about Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (surely Weil deserves better); of visiting Albert Camus' home and being given time alone with the manuscript of The First Man, with its "unflinching unity with his subject"; of surrealists and anarchists and travels here and there. Sometimes Smith catches a poetic wave and rides it capably, as when she writes, "it occurs to me that the young look beautiful as they sleep and the old, such as myself, look dead." It's not the profoundest thought she's ever expressed, but it's nicely rendered all the same. Not so many other passages, though--e.g., can a monotone be lilting? Not Smith's best work--fine for devotees but pretty thin gruel for the uninitiated.COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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August 1, 2017
Smith (M Train, 2015), a contemplative writer of gratitude and reverence who names her muses in poems, memoirs, and songs, deepens her inquiry into the nature of inspiration in this slender, trenchant volume, the first in Yale's Why I Write series. In lyric essays, a story, poems, and photographs, Smith illuminates the whirl of chance and choice that stokes a writer's imagination, recounting her fascination on the eve of a trip to Paris with Simone Weil and an evocative, accidentally discovered film about Stalin's mass deportation of Estonians. In France, a gravestone, a televised figure-skating competition, a meal, and a garden all converge in what becomes Devotion, an exquisite and devastating fairy tale about a young, displaced Estonian skater and a solitary dealer in rare objects and arms. This reverberating and tragic fable about creativity and obsession, possession and freedom is followed by a meditation on how a work of art is, for other artists, a call to action. Gracefully improvisational, as always, Smith offers an unusually poetic, mystical, and transfixing perspective on the mystery of literary creation.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)
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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's house, and visit the garden of the great publisher Gallimard where...- sortTitle
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