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.
