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.
