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.
