M Train

Cover Type: Softcover
Book Condition: Fine
Jacket Condition: None Issued
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Publisher Place: Uk
Publisher Year: 2015
Edition: First Edition

Description: 272 pages. Book appears to have hardly been read and is in Fine condition throughout.

Publishers Description: The new book from Patti Smith, one of the greatest artists of her generation M Train begins in the tiny Greenwich Village cafe 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 Kahlos Casa Azul in Mexico; to a meeting of an Arctic explorers society in Berlin; to a ramshackle seaside bungalow in New Yorks 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 writers craft and on artistic creation. Here, too, are singular memories of Smiths 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. Caroline Baums review This slim volume is hard to describe and to categorise. It appears to be about nothing much and yet it has a haunting quality. Smith is a poet in every phrase and every cadence. Fuelled by superhuman coffee intake (fourteen cups a day!) she goes in search of the best beans on the planet, drifting, digressing, dreaming and reading. Seemingly directionless and flimsy, this is a marvellously seductive collection of fragments that demonstrate Smiths erudition as a reader of obscure and classic texts and proves that her first book, Just Kids, was no fluke. In that stunning debut, her incredible roster of friends from Mapplethorpe to Burrows featured prominently. Here, she is closer to the dead than the living (with the exception of Marukami), paying homage to Frida Kahlo, WG Sebald and Schiller on meandering pilgrimages that defy time. A marvellous book to get lost in.

ISBN: 9781408867693