Year of the Monkey

Patti Smith

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Riveting, elegant, humorous–and illustrated by Smith’s signature Polaroids–New York Times bestseller Year of the Monkey is a moving and original work, a touchstone for our turbulent times.

\”A picaresque voyage through Patti Smith’s dreams and life, blending fiction and reality, conjured characters and actual ones\”–The New York Times

Following a run of new year’s concerts at San Francisco’s legendary Fillmore, Patti Smith finds herself tramping the coast of Santa Cruz, about to embark on a year of solitary wandering. Unfettered by logic or time, she draws us into her private wonderland, in which she debates intellectual grifters and spars with the likes of a postmodern Cheshire Cat. Then, in February 2016, a surreal lunar year begins, bringing unexpected turns, heightened mischief, and inescapable sorrow. For Smith–inveterately curious, always exploring, always writing–this becomes a year of reckoning with the changes in life’s gyre: with loss, aging, and a dramatic shift in the political landscape of America.

Taking us from California to the Arizona desert, from a Kentucky farm to the hospital room of a valued mentor, Smith melds the western landscape with her own dreamscape in a haunting, poetic blend of fact and fiction. As a stranger tells her, \”Anything is possible. After all, it’s the Year of the Monkey.\” But as Smith heads toward a new decade in her own life, she offers this balm to the reader: her wisdom, wit, gimlet eye, and above all, a rugged hope for a better world.

Named one of NPR’s Best Books of the Year–now including a new chapter, Epilogue of an Epilogue, and ten new photos–Year of the Monkey \”reminds us that despair and possibility often spring from the same source\” (Los Angeles Times).

$25

In stock

ISBN – 9781526614766
Publisher – Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Format – Paperback
Publication Date – 01/12/2020
Dimensions – 196mm X 132mm
Categories – Music

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Patti Smith
M Train

From the National Book Award-winning author of Just Kids a \”sublime collection of true stories … and wild imaginings that take us to the very heart of who Patti Smith is\” (Vanity Fair), told through the caf s and haunts she has worked in around the world. Patti Smith calls this bestselling work \”a roadmap to my life.\”

M Train begins in the tiny Greenwich Village caf where Smith goes every morning for black coffee, ruminates on the world as it is and the world as it was, and writes in her notebook. Through prose that shifts fluidly between dreams and reality, past and present, we travel to Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul in Mexico; to the fertile moon terrain of Iceland; to a ramshackle seaside bungalow in New York’s Far Rockaway that Smith acquires just before Hurricane Sandy hits; to the West 4th Street subway station, filled with the sounds of the Velvet Underground after the death of Lou Reed; and to the graves of Genet, Plath, Rimbaud, and Mishima.

Woven throughout are reflections on the writer’s craft and on artistic creation. Here, too, are singular memories of Smith’s life in Michigan and the irremediable loss of her husband, Fred Sonic Smith.

Braiding despair with hope and consolation, illustrated with her signature Polaroids, M Train is a meditation on travel, detective shows, literature, and coffee. It is a powerful, deeply moving book by one of the most remarkable multiplatform artists at work today.

Featuring a postscript with five new photos from Patti Smith

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Just Kids

THE AWARD-WINNING MASTERPIECE THAT DEFINED ROCK’N’ROLL MEMOIR AND CAPTURED AN ERANow richly illustrated with new material and never-before-seen photographs‘Sharp, elegiac and finely crafted’ SUNDAY TIMES‘So honest and pure as to count as true rapture’ JOAN DIDION‘Tender, harrowing, hilarious’ VOGUE‘A poetic masterpiece’ JOHNNY DEPP Patti’s Smith’s exquisite prose is generously illustrated in this full-color edition of her classic coming-of-age memoir, Just Kids. New York locations vividly come to life where, as young artists, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe met and fell in love: a first apartment in Brooklyn, Times Square with John and Yoko’s iconic billboard, Max’s Kansas City, or the gritty fire escape of the Hotel Chelsea. The extraordinary people who passed through their lives are also pictured: Sam Shepard, Harry Smith, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg. Along with never-before-published photographs, drawings, and ephemera, this edition captures a moment in New York when everything was possible. And when two kids seized their destinies as artists and soul mates in this inspired story of love and friendship.

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