Synopsis:
National Best Seller
From the National Book Award–winning author of Just Kids: an unforgettable odyssey of a legendary artist, told through the prism of the cafés and haunts she has worked in around the world. It is a book Patti Smith has described as “a roadmap to my life.”
M Train begins in the tiny Greenwich Village café 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, and across a landscape of creative aspirations and inspirations, we travel to Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul in Mexico; to a meeting of an Arctic explorer’s society in Berlin; to a ramshackle seaside bungalow in New York’s Far Rockaway that Smith acquires just before Hurricane Sandy hits; 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.
Review:
This book is brilliant. A poetic, energetic search for thesecret links between life and art and coffee. Henning Mankell
An eloquent and a deeply moving elegy for what she has lost and cannot find but can remember in words. The New York Times
Elegiac, melancholic, and meditative, filled with wistful flashbacks and haunting Polaroid snapshots. NPR
Begins in a tiny Greenwich Village cafe and ends as a dream requiem to the same place, encompassing an entire lost world. . . . Yet despite all of these losses, there is extraordinary joy here. . . . Readers who share in Smith s transcendent pilgrimage may find themselves reborn within the pages of this exquisite memoir. The Washington Post
Weaves poetry, dreams, art, literature, and conversational fragments into a phantasmagoric, atmospheric, and transportive whole. . . . Brilliant. . . . Where Just Kids concerned Smith s hopefulness, hunger, callowness, and loss, M Train is about being lost and found. The Boston Globe
M Trainis a great meditation on solitude, independence, age, a ride-along with the last Romantic standing. . . . Patti Smith inventories her inspirations, and makes her house out of the life lived, out of the love spent. USA Today
M Train comes near to accomplishing Marcel Proust s goal to follow the workings of the human mind and the human heart. By the end of the book you know that nothing is everything, and that life is a labor of love. Harper s Bazaar
[Smith] opens her extraordinary heart and soul to us, holding nothing back and never permitting vanity to intrude. It s a gift, this record of beloved absences, to which one can only respond: thank you. O, The Oprah Magazine
M Trainis an impressionistic weave of dreams, disasters, and epiphanies, a meditation on life and art by a woman who sees them as one. Rolling Stone
A sublime collection of true stories concerning irredeemable loss, memory, travel, crime, coffee, books, and wild imaginings that take us to the very heart of who Patti Smith is. Vanity Fair
Marvelous . . . M Train is a book of days, a year in the life, a series of reflections. . . . The message is that living is a kind of invocation, or better yet, a form of prayer. Los Angeles Times"
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