 First edition | |
| Author | Patti Smith |
|---|---|
| Audio read by | Patti Smith |
| Subject | Memoir |
| Publisher | Alfred A. Knopf, Random House Audio |
Publication date | 2015 |
| Media type | Print / Audio |
| Pages | 253 |
| ISBN | 978-1-101-87510-0 (Hardcover) |
| 782.4216092 | |
| LC Class | ML420.S672 |
M Train is a 2015 memoir written by Patti Smith. Smith's audiobook recording of M Train earned a Grammy Award nomination for Best Spoken Word Album.
Smith published M Train in 2015 with Alfred A. Knopf. [1]
M Train is Smith's second memoir, [2] following the 2010 National Book Award-winning Just Kids . [3] While Just Kids recounts Smith's early life, the beginning of her career and particularly her relationship with artist Robert Mapplethorpe, [4] M Train focuses on a later portion of her life, the period since the release of her debut album Horses in 1975. [3] The memoir particularly recounts the personal losses that marked the forty-year span between Horses and M Train, including the deaths of Mapplethorpe in 1989, of AIDS; Smith's husband, guitarist Fred "Sonic" Smith, in 1994 at 45, of heart failure; [5] and Smith's brother Todd a month later, of a stroke. [6]
The book also discusses the 16 years in this period during which Smith was not performing; instead, living in Detroit with her husband and two children, she spent early mornings writing stories before her family awoke. [1] The title, M Train, referring to this imaginative work, invokes a "mind train" that "goes to any station it wants." [1]
M Train received strongly favorable reviews. In The New York Times , book critic Michiko Kakutani called the book "achingly beautiful" with "lyrical and radiantly pictorial" prose. [6] In The Washington Post, novelist Elizabeth Hand described the book as being as "perceptive and beautifully written as its predecessor" Just Kids. [3] In one mild dissent, novelist Charles Finch wrote in the Chicago Tribune that M Train "didn't change my life" but "it's also easy to see why so many readers say that it has," noting it shares Just Kids' "gangly but lovely writing, the same resolute faith in the consolations of art, the same odd flashes of humor, the same rawness to memory and experience...it's obvious why some readers find a deep, deep correspondence to their own inner lives in [Smith's] work." [7]
M Train was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album. [8]
Patricia Lee 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.
Horses is the debut studio album by American musician Patti Smith. It was released on November 10, 1975 by Arista Records. A fixture of the mid-1970s underground rock music scene in New York City, Smith signed to Arista in 1975 and recorded Horses with her band at Electric Lady Studios in August and September of that year. She enlisted former Velvet Underground member John Cale to produce the album.
Robert Michael Mapplethorpe was an American photographer, best known for his black-and-white photographs. His work featured an array of subjects, including celebrity portraits, male and female nudes, self-portraits, and still-life images. His most controversial works documented and examined the gay male BDSM subculture of New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A 1989 exhibition of Mapplethorpe's work, titled Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment, sparked a debate in the United States concerning both use of public funds for "obscene" artwork and the Constitutional limits of free speech in the United States.
Anne Tyler is an American novelist, short story writer, and literary critic. She has published twenty-four novels, including Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), The Accidental Tourist (1985), and Breathing Lessons (1988). All three were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Breathing Lessons won the prize in 1989. She has also won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2012 she was awarded The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence. Tyler's twentieth novel, A Spool of Blue Thread, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2015, and Redhead By the Side of the Road was longlisted for the same award in 2020. She is recognized for her fully developed characters, her "brilliantly imagined and absolutely accurate detail", her "rigorous and artful style", and her "astute and open language."
Arthur Phillips is an American novelist. His books include Prague (2002), The Egyptologist (2004), Angelica (2007), The Song Is You (2009), The Tragedy of Arthur (2011), and The King at the Edge of the World (2020).
Independence Day is a 1995 novel by Richard Ford and the sequel to Ford's 1986 novel The Sportswriter. This novel is the second in what is now a four-part series, the first being The Sportswriter. It was followed by The Lay of the Land (2006) and Let Me Be Frank With You (2014). Independence Day won the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1996, becoming the first novel ever to win both awards in a single year.
Michiko Kakutani is an American writer and retired literary critic, best known for reviewing books for The New York Times from 1983 to 2017. In that role, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1998.
Azadeh Moaveni is an Iranian-American writer, journalist, and academic. She directs the Gender and Conflict Program at the International Crisis Group, and lectures on journalism at New York University’s London campus. She is the author of four books, including the bestselling Lipstick Jihad and Guest House for Young Widows, which was shortlisted for numerous prizes. She contributes to The New York Times, The Guardian, and The London Review of Books.
The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History is a 2006 memoir by Jonathan Franzen, who received the National Book Award for Fiction for his novel The Corrections in 2001.
André Aciman is an Italian-American writer. Born and raised in Alexandria, Egypt, he is currently a distinguished professor at the Graduate Center of City University of New York, where he teaches the history of literary theory and the works of Marcel Proust. Aciman previously taught creative writing at New York University and French literature at Princeton and Bard College.
Atticus Finch is a fictional character in Harper Lee's Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel of 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird. A preliminary version of the character also appears in the novel Go Set a Watchman, written in the mid-1950s but not published until 2015. Atticus is a lawyer and resident of the fictional Maycomb County, Alabama, and the father of Jeremy "Jem" Finch and Jean Louise "Scout" Finch. He represents the African-American man Tom Robinson in his trial where he is charged with rape of Mayella Ewell. Lee based the character on her own father, Amasa Coleman Lee, an Alabama lawyer, who, like Atticus, represented black defendants in a highly publicized criminal trial. Book magazine's list of The 100 Best Characters in Fiction Since 1900 names Finch as the seventh best fictional character of 20th-century literature. In 2003, the American Film Institute voted Atticus Finch, as portrayed in an Academy Award-winning performance by Gregory Peck in the 1962 film adaptation, as the greatest hero of all American cinema. In the 2018 Broadway stage play adapted by Aaron Sorkin, Finch has been portrayed by various actors including Jeff Daniels, Ed Harris, Greg Kinnear, Rhys Ifans, and Richard Thomas.
The Liars' Club is a memoir by the American author Mary Karr. Published in 1995 by Viking Adult, the book tells the story of Karr's childhood in the 1960s in a small industrial town in Southeast Texas. The title refers to her father and his friends who would gather together to drink and tell stories when they were not working at the local oil refinery or the chemical plant.
Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member is a memoir about gang life written in prison by Sanyika Shakur.
Adam Johnson is an American novelist and short story writer. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2012 novel, The Orphan Master's Son, and the National Book Award for his 2015 story collection Fortune Smiles. He is also a professor of English at Stanford University with a focus on creative writing.
Robert Hilburn is an American pop music critic, author, and radio host. As critic and music editor at the Los Angeles Times from 1970 to 2005, his reviews, essays and profiles appeared in publications around the world. Hilburn has since written a memoir and best-selling biographies of Johnny Cash and Paul Simon. He was a member of the nominating committee of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for more than twenty years, and lives in Los Angeles.
Just Kids is a memoir by Patti Smith, published on January 19, 2010, documenting her relationship with artist Robert Mapplethorpe.
My Beloved World is a memoir written by Sonia Sotomayor, the first Hispanic justice on the United States Supreme Court, about her childhood, education, and life through 1992.
Between the World and Me is a 2015 nonfiction book written by American author Ta-Nehisi Coates and published by Spiegel & Grau. It was written by Coates as a letter to his then-teenage son about his perception of what the feelings, symbolism, and realities associated with being Black in the United States are. Coates recapitulates American history and explains to his son "racist violence that has been woven into American culture." Coates draws from an abridged, autobiographical account of his youth in Baltimore, detailing his beliefs about what are the ways in which, to him, institutions like schools, the local police, and even "the streets" discipline, endanger, and threaten to "disembody" black men and women.
Moonglow is a 2016 novel by Michael Chabon. The book chronicles the life of Chabon's grandfather, a WW2 soldier, engineer and rocket enthusiast who marries a troubled Jewish survivor from France and lives a challenging, wandering life in postwar America. Chabon tells the story using a mixture of strict memoir and creative fiction writing. The narrator functions as a proxy for the author, Chabon.
Mapplethorpe is a 2018 American biographical drama film written and directed by Ondi Timoner about the life of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Shooting began on July 11, 2017 in New York and lasted only 19 days. It premiered at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival.