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.
