M Train

by Patti Smith Narrated by Patti Smith

Overview

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.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani

Patti Smith's achingly beautiful new book…is a kaleidoscopic ballad about the losses dealt out by time and chance and circumstance…Ms. Smith…is remarkably attuned to the sound and sorcery of words, and her prose here is both lyrical and radiantly pictorial…She captures a passing mood…as deftly as she conjures her cat Cairo…or a childhood memory…or a sad, post-Sandy Christmas in the Rockaways…If Just Kids was about starting out as an artist and setting forth in the world, M Train feels more like a look at the past through a rearview mirror…"I'm going to remember everything," she thinks, "and then I'm going to write it all down. An aria to a coat. A requiem for a cafe." An eloquent—and a deeply moving—elegy for what she has "lost and cannot find" but can remember in words.

The New York Times Book Review - M. G. Lord

Where Just Kids, [Smith's] 2010 memoir, charted her path from childhood to celebrity, M Train does not move in a simple arc from one destination to another. It meanders between her interior life and her life in the world, connecting dreams, reflections and memories. Smith's rich, inventive language lures the reader down this nonformulaic path. She doesn't slap a convenient label on emotions; she dissects them, refusing to dismiss her "light yet lingering malaise" as depression. Rather, it is "a fascination for melancholia, which I turn in my hand as if it were a small planet, streaked in shadow, impossibly blue."

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172078057
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	10/06/2015
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

In 1965 I had come to New York City from South Jersey just to roam around, and nothing seemed more romantic than to write poetry in a Greenwich Village café. I finally got the courage to enter Caffè Dante on MacDougal Street. The walls were covered with printed murals of the city of Florence and scenes from The Divine Comedy.
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "M Train"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Patti Smith.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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