LISNews: Librarian News

Patti Smith won the National Book Award for Nonfiction this past week for her memoir "Just Kids," which recounts her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe in the '60s and '70s. But "Just Kids" is far from her first flirtation with the written word.

Smith has actually published numerous books of poetry. And unlike other successful rock stars who have stumbled awkwardly into verse (Jewel and Billy Corgan come to mind), Smith's work reflects that she was a poet first, and that her love affair with the art runs deep.
It was the summer Coltrane died, the summer of love and riots, and the summer when a chance encounter in Brooklyn led two young people on a path of art, devotion, and initiation.

Patti Smith would evolve as a poet and performer, and Robert Mapplethorpe would direct his highly provocative style toward photography. Bound in innocence and enthusiasm, they traversed the city from Coney Island to Forty-second Street, and eventually to the celebrated round table of Max's Kansas City. It was a time of heightened awareness, when the worlds of poetry, rock and roll, art, and sexual politics were colliding and exploding. Just Kids begins as a love story and ends as an elegy. It serves as a salute to New York City during the late sixties and seventies. -- Read More

OMG, he's lost his bookmark...in the woods...with books he HASN'T even read.

The Washington Post's Ron Charles presents... "I'M NOT A WITCH, I'M A BOOK CRITIC". Guest appearance by author Lisa Scottoline in a reenactment of Hitchcock's shower scene from Psycho. Wild.

Another video book review of the Book Prize Finalists from the Washington Post's hipper than hip Ron Charles:

EarlyWord has an interesting entry titled:
DAILY SHOW Appearance Trumps NYT BR

Excerpt: It can now be quantified; an appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart does more for a book’s sales than a review in the NYT Book Review.

Full entry here: http://www.earlyword.com/2010/09/07/daily-show-appearance-trumps-nyt-br/