M Train
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4.6 • 7 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From the National Book Award-winning author of Just Kids: an unforgettable odyssey into the mind of this legendary artist, told through the prism of cafés and haunts she has visited and worked in around the world.
M Train is a journey through seventeen "stations." It 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. We then travel, through prose that shifts fluidly between dreams and reality, past and present, across a landscape of creative aspirations and inspirations: from Frida Kahlo's Casa Azul in Mexico, to a meeting of an Arctic explorer's society in Berlin; from the ramshackle seaside bungalow in New York's Far Rockaway that Smith buys just before Hurricane Sandy hits, to the graves of Genet, Plath, Rimbaud and Mishima. Woven throughout are reflections on the writer's craft and on artistic creation, alongside signature memories, including of her life in Michigan with her husband, guitarist Fred Sonic Smith, whose untimely death was an irremediable loss. For it is loss, as well as the consolation we might salvage from it, that lies at the heart of this exquisitely told memoir, one augmented by stunning black-and-white Polaroids taken by Smith herself. M Train is a meditation on endings and on beginnings: a poetic tour de force by one of the most brilliant, multi-platform artists at work today.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
In Just Kids, poet and songwriter Patti Smith captured the glory of falling in love: with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, with downtown New York, with the bohemian life. Her new memoir is more amorphous, but no less beautiful and inspiring. In M Train, Smith turns her laser-beam focus on fleeting moments and indelible memories: sitting in a favourite cafe, a quixotic trip to French Guiana, falling in love with a dilapidated beach shack in a seaside Queens neighborhood. It’s the kind of book that inspires you to chase new experiences. Throughout, Smith’s intelligence, creativity and wit shine through, as does her love of her late husband, Fred Sonic Smith.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
