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National Book Award winning author and rock star Patti Smith will work with Tony Award winning playwright John Logan on an adaptation of her memoir, Just Kids.

Logan has worked on a number of film scripts, including Gladiator, The Aviator, Sweeney Todd, and Rango. The book followed Smith’s relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, exploring the New York City music and art scene during two tumultuous decades.

Here’s more from the release: “Currently in its thirty-seventh week on the New York Times bestseller list, Just Kids has also been translated into twenty-seven languages. Patti Smith is a writer, performer, and visual artist. She gained recognition in the 1970s for her revolutionary mergence of poetry and rock, and for her seminal album Horses. She is presently recording her thirteenth album for a 2012 release. In 2005, the French Ministry of Culture awarded Smith the prestigious title of Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres. In 2007, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.”

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Today Barnes & Noble revealed that National Book Award winner and singer/songwriter Patti Smith will publish an essay exclusively for Nook users. Entitled “The Year of the Book,” readers must visit a Barnes & Noble store with a Nook device to download the essay.

The essay will be available on February 5th, only offered for four weeks. Here’s more about the essay: “In this exclusive essay for Barnes & Noble, Smith writes about the year that changed everything for her as a writer and about the books that got her there.”

The program works through the through the company’s “More in Store” program. Do you think this kind of in-store download program can help preserve the brick-and-mortar bookstore?

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I never read nearly as much as I'd like to read—my multiple worlds are perpetually colliding, fracturing time. But I was so gratified to learn that, on this year's list of NBCC nominees, many of the books I'd loved best and celebrated here, on my blog, are being equally celebrated by the judges.  In Autobiography, there's Patti Smith's remarkable Just Kids, Darin Strauss's deeply moving Half a Life, and the thoughtful, provocative Hiroshima in the Morning, by my much-loved friend, Rahna Reiko Rizzuto.  In Criticism, there's Elif Batuman's The Possessed and Ander Monson's Vanishing Point.  I'd put all five books on my Penn syllabus months ago, and here they are—proven, lifted, upheld.

A huge congratulations to them all, and, especially, to my dear friend, Reiko.  I've linked to my own reflections about these books here, should you be interested in how they affected me early on.

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I am powerless when it comes to intelligent conversation—utterly done in when two learned, well-lived, curious people go back and forth, talking craft, talking wanting (this need I have for real conversation renders me pretty useless at most cocktail parties, I confess, an utter bore).  Conversation is what we get in the January 2011 issue of Vanity Fair—Patti Smith (and you know that I loved her memoir) interviewing Johnny Depp (who needs to say more?).

Look at how far afield from the traditional celebrity interview this goes. Look at what Hollywood mashing with Rock and Roll can be:

Smith:  When you spouted a few lines of poetry to Samantha Morton, who played Elizabeth Barry in the movie—that was my introduction to Wilmot's work, to his poetry.  And I noticed in Alice, when the Hatter recites, "Jabberwocky," that you have a gift for giving us the full measure of a poet's work. It is really quite difficult. Could you imagine doing a recording of works of poetry?

Depp:  I don't know.  It's daunting, because you don't know exactly... I mean, you can decipher the intent, and you can kind of swim around in the guts of it, but you just don't know how the poet would have wanted it read.

Smith:  Yes, but that's no different than Glenn Gould having to anticipate how Bach would want his work played.  I thought the Hatter's reading of "Jabberwocky" was luminous.  Yesterday you read me a poem written by the Elephant Man.  I didn't know he wrote poetry.  The poem you recited was heartbreaking.  How did you come to find it?

Depp:  I made an appointment at the hospital where they had his remains....

 

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I couldn't stop reading Just Kids, Patti Smith's memoir.  I was supposed to be doing other things—was in the land of mouse ears and Grumpy, among writers and teachers, in a hotel nestled around this cloud-reflecting lagoon.  But Patti Smith writes poetry, she tells a story, she searches for truth, and Just Kids is so full of the surprising line, the arresting scene.  It's full of Patti Smith herself, a rock and roller with a vulnerable heart, a scorcher of a performer who nonetheless craves the sacred companionship of books.

Just Kids is advertised primarily as the story of Smith's relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, and that it is.  But it is also the story of Smith's ascension through art—the years she spent choosing between buying a cheap meal and an old imprint, between being an artist or a writer, between being Mapplethorpe's lover and his best friend.  She tells us about the conversations that generate ideas among artists and friends, about coincidences that set a life on its path, about the clothes she wore and the mis-impressions she couldn't correct, about a kind of love that is bigger than any definition the world might want to latch onto it.  She yields an entire era to us, and though her writing is all sinew, strength, and honesty, she does not once betray her friends, does not invite us to imagine privacies that should remain beyond the veil.

This is, then, a revelation of a book, an exemplar.  I could quote from every line.  I'll simply give you the beginning:

When I was very young, my mother took me for walks in Humboldt Park, along the edge of the Prairie River.  I have vague memories, like impressions on glass plates, of an old boathouse, a circular band shell, an arched stone bridge.  The narrows of the river emptied into a wide lagoon and I saw upon its surface a singular miracle.  A long curving neck rose from a dress of white plumage.

You don't assess writing like that.  You honor it. The National Book Award Nonfiction Panel got this one just right.

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Because Lilian Nattel is a very brilliant author and reader, I trust her, and when she sang the praises of Adam Foulds' The Quickening Maze back in late June, I knew I'd be reading the book sooner than later.  And when the dear and deep and perpetually risk-taking Elizabeth Hand wrote (long before the National Book Award list had been unveiled) that I absolutely had to read Just Kids by Patti Smith (she'd reviewed it for the Washington Post), I said, All right, Liz.  I will.

Yesterday, released for the afternoon from client work, I headed to the Chester County Book & Music Company, which is another version of paradise on earth.  We're talking an indie book store here that feels a city block deep, and those who work there stack their favorite reads up and down end shelves.  I get lost there, and I don't mind one bit. 

This afternoon, I board a plane.  Smith's coming with me.  So is Foulds.

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9:29 David Steinberger, chairman of the National Book Foundation is on stage talking about how the judges decide on the winners. It happened today at lunch.

9:32 Steinberger is thanking all of the former winners and the sponsors.

9:34 Steinberger is naming the winners of the Innovations in Reading Prize from earlier in the week. Find out more here.

9:39 Andy Borowitz is back on stage to introduce Tor Seidler who is presenting the award for The Young People’s Literature. There were more than 200 novels in the category.

9:42 The winner is Kathryn Erskine for Mockingbird.

9:44 Cornelius Eady is taking the stage to present the award for Poetry.

9:50 The winner is Terrance Hayes for Lighthead.

9:52 Marjorie Garber has taken the stage to present the award for Nonfiction.

9:54 The winner is Patti Smith for Just Kids. Smith says she always wanted to have a book of her own since she worked in a book store as a kid. “There is nothing more beautiful in our material world than the book.” She says never to abandon the book.

9:58 Joanna Scott is taking the stage to introduce the award for Fiction.

10:04 The winner is Jaimy Gordon for Lord of Misrule. Gordon: “I am totally unprepared and I am totally surprised.”

10:06 The awards are over, thanks for following our live blog.

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Allan Tannenbaum's New York in the 70s exhibition and book is the talk of the town - featured in The New York Times Book Review Summer Reading issue, and also in Women's Wear Daily:

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