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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.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Awards
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Release date
October 6, 2015 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9781101923030
- File size: 188356 KB
- Duration: 06:32:24
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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AudioFile Magazine
Patti Smith is best known as a musician--her most famous tune, "Because The Night," rocks on. But this memoir, her second, contains nothing about her music. It's a series of personal reveries on her late husband, eclectic travels, coffee shops, her cottage on Rockaway Beach, destroyed by Hurricane Sandy. In her narration, her authentic personal style may come across as a monotone, especially to those who are expecting her rocker expressiveness. Such listeners may think her lack of emphasis sounds as if she has no personal connection with the words. Those who admire Smith the poet, visual artist, and author of the acclaimed earlier memoir JUST KIDS will most likely appreciate the authenticity of her reading, if not the style itself. M.S. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine -
Publisher's Weekly
Starred review from August 10, 2015
Following Smith’s bestselling and critically acclaimed book Just Kids, this essay collection creates a map of the singer-songwriter’s peripatetic journeys to cafes, cemeteries, hotels, and train stations around the world. She is the perfect guide, revealing the mysteries in the shadows, the little bits of life people often take for granted—such as a good cup of coffee, a familiar coat, or the “transformation of the heart.” In 19 imagistic reflections, Smith invites readers to travel with her from Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul and Sylvia Plath’s grave to the Far Rockaway bungalow that Smith buys just before Hurricane Sandy comes ashore and destroys much of the surrounding territory. Smith’s haunting and joyful recollections of her life with her late husband, Fred Sonic Smith, anchor her intensely physical descent into memory and its ability to haunt her waking and dreaming life. Smith illustrates her meditations with her signature Polaroid photos of Fred, as well as objects such as her father’s desk chair and the chess table where Bobby Fischer played Boris Spassky. The narrative carries readers through the despair, loss, hope, consolation, and mysteries that Smith faces as she lives through Fred’s death, struggles with the writer’s craft, and comes to realize, through one of her dreams, that the “writer is a conductor”—and she is indeed a phenomenal conductor along these elegant tours of the haunting places in her life, where anyone might stumble upon momentary but life-altering wisdom. -
Publisher's Weekly
April 4, 2016
This essay collection creates a map of National Book Award–winner Smith’s peripatetic journeys to cafes, cemeteries, hotels, and train stations around the world. In 19 imagistic reflections, Smith invites readers to travel with her from Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul and Sylvia Plath’s grave to the Far Rockaway bungalow that Smith buys just before Hurricane Sandy comes ashore and destroys much of the surrounding territory. She ambles across space, time, and even reality as she weaves meaningful moments, emotional experiences such as the loss of her husband, and even the smaller moments her in life. In the audio edition, Smith’s vocal delivery proves as compelling as her writing. Her prose takes on the rhythm of poetry with shifts in cadence and long pauses. Underlining her delivery is a tension that feels akin to a sneer or sidelong look; it’s as if she is confronting or daring the listener to take this journey with her more so than inviting. This method is seductive, and listeners will have a hard time stepping away from her idiosyncratic narration. A Knopf hardcover.
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Formats
- OverDrive Listen audiobook
Languages
- English
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