National Bestseller Featuring a new postscript including five new photos from Patti Smith
From the National Book Award-winning author of Just Kids: an unforgettable odyssey of a
legendary artist told through 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 we travel to Frida Kahlo's Casa Azul in Mexico
to the fertile moon terrain of Iceland to a ramshackle seaside bungalow in New York's Far
Rockaway that Smith acquires just before Hurricane Sandy hits to the West 4th Street subway
station filled with the sounds of the Velvet Underground after the death of Lou Reed 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.
