Bread of Angels

Resumen del libro

God whispers through a crease in the wallpaper, writes Patti Smith in this indelible account of her life as an artist. A post-Second World War childhood unfolds in a condemned housing complex described in Dickensian detail: consumptive children, vanishing neighbours, an infested rat house, and a beguiling book of Irish fairytales. We enter the child's world of the imagination where 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 heroes and role models as Patti starts to write poetry, then lyrics, merging both into the iconic songs and recordings such as Horses and Easter, 'Dancing Barefoot' and 'Because the Night'.

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 with ancient willows and fulsome pear trees. She builds a room of her own, furnished with a pillow of Moroccan silk, a Persian cup, inkwell and fountain pen.

The couple spend nights in their landlocked Chris-Craft studying nautical maps and charting new adventures as they start their family.

As Smith suffers profound losses, 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 mundane into the beautiful, the commonplace into the magical, and pain into hope. In the final pages, we meet Patti on the road again, the vagabond who travels to commune with herself, who lives to write and writes to live.

Biografía del autor

x{0026}lt;P x{0026}lt;B Patti Smith x{0026}lt;/B (Chicago, 1946) es escritora, cantante y artista visual. Obtuvo un gran reconocimiento en la década de 1970 con la difusión de su poesía y su rock. Ha publicado doce álbumes, entre ellos x{0026}lt;I Horsesx{0026}lt;/I , considerado uno de los cien mejores de todos los tiempos por la revista x{0026}lt;I Rolling Stonex{0026}lt;/I . Smith realizó su primera exposición de dibujos en el Gotham Book Mart en 1973, fue representada por la Robert Miller Gallery durante tres décadas y sus muestras retrospectivas han tenido lugar en el Andy Warhol Museum, la Fondation Cartier y el Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. Entre sus libros cabe destacar la historia de su relación con el fotógrafo Robert Mapplethorpe: x{0026}lt;I Éramos unos niños x{0026}lt;/I (Lumen, 2010, 2025), galardonada con el National Book Award, Witt, Babel, x{0026}lt;I Tejiendo sueñosx{0026}lt;/I (Lumen, 2014), x{0026}lt;I El mar de Coral x{0026}lt;/I (Lumen, 2012),x{0026}lt;I Augurios de inocenciax{0026}lt;/I (Lumen, 2019), x{0026}lt;I M Train x{0026}lt;/I (Lumen, 2016), x{0026}lt;I Devoción x{0026}lt;/I (Lumen, 2018), x{0026}lt;I El año del Monox{0026}lt;/I (Lumen, 2020), x{0026}lt;I El libro de los díasx{0026}lt;/I (Lumen, 2023) yx{0026}lt;I Pan de ángelesx{0026}lt;/I (Lumen, 2025). En 2005, el ministro de Cultura francés le concedió el título de Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres, el mayor honor otorgado a un artista por la República francesa. Entró en el Rock x{0026}amp; Roll Hall of Fame en 2007. Smith se casó con el músico Fred Sonic Smith en Detroit en 1980. Tuvieron dos hijos: Jackson y Jesse. La autora, que en 2020 recibió el Premio al Servicio Literario Pen America, reside en Nueva York.x{0026}lt;/P