Patti Smith burst on to the New York punk scene with her 1975 seminal album Horses. A bright flame in music for more than three-decades, she has influenced the likes of REM, The Smiths, and Garbage. An acclaimed visual artist and poet, and recipient of a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French Ministry of Culture, she’s now turned to prose with the memoire Just Kids, about her friendship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Jonathan Lethem’s National Book Critics Circle award-winning novel Motherless Brooklyn, about a detective with Tourette syndrome, had The New York Times crown him as “something of a hipster celebrity.” He’s also the author of The Fortress of Solitude and Chronic City.
Together they talk about Just Kids and some of their shared passions along the way—the visual arts, literature (of course) and their love for the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño.
