Year of the monkey

Format:

Book

Title:

Year of the monkey

Author:

Smith, Patti author

ISBN:

9780525657682

9780735279285

Edition:

First edition.

Publication:

New York ; Toronto : Alfred A. Knopf : Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2019.

Physical Description:

171 pages : illustrations ; 21 cm

General Note:

"A Borzoi Book"--Title page verso.

Contents:

Way out West -- ICU -- YOM 2016 -- What Marcus said -- Big red -- Intermission -- Home is the sailor -- Imitation of a dream -- Black butterflies -- Amulets -- In search of imaginos -- Why Belinda Carlisle matters -- The holy see -- The mystic lamb -- The golden cockerel -- A night on the moon -- A kind of epilogue.

Summary:

"Following a run of New Year's concerts at San Francisco's legendary Fillmore, Patti Smith finds herself tramping the coast of Santa Cruz, about to embark on a year of solitary wandering. Unfettered by logic or time, she draws us into her private wonderland with no design, yet heeding signs -- including a talking sign that looms above her, prodding and sparring like the Cheshire Cat. In February, a surreal lunar year begins, bringing with it unexpected turns, heightened mischief, and inescapable sorrow. In a stranger's words, "Anything is possible: after all, it's the Year of the Monkey." For Smith -- inveterately curious, always exploring, tracking thoughts, writing -- the year evolves as one of reckoning with the changes in life's gyre: with loss, aging, and a dramatic shift in the political landscape of America. Smith melds the western landscape with her own dreamscape. Taking us from California to the Arizona desert; to a Kentucky farm as the amanuensis of a friend in crisis; to the hospital room of a valued mentor; and by turns to remembered and imagined places, this haunting memoir blends fact and fiction with poetic mastery. The unexpected happens; grief and disillusionment set in. But as Smith heads toward a new decade in her own life, she offers this balm to the reader: her wisdom, wit, gimlet eye, and above all, a rugged hope for a better world." -- Publisher's description

Personal Subject:

Smith, Patti.

Smith, Patti

Subject(s):

Poets, American -- 20th century -- Biography.

Women rock musicians -- United States -- Biography.

Geographic Term:

United States

Genre:

Autobiographies.

autobiographies (literary works)

Holds:

Available:*

Library	Call Number	Status
Searching... Salem Main Library	921 Smith, Patti 2019	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Dallas Public Library	921 Smith	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Independence Public Library	BIOGRAPHY - SMITH 2019	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Silver Falls Library	921 SMITH	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Stayton Public Library	921 SMITH Patti	Searching... Unknown
Searching... West Salem Branch Library	921 Smith, Patti 2019	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

New York Times Best Seller

From the National Book Award-winning author of Just Kids and M Train , a profound, beautifully realized memoir in which dreams and reality are vividly woven into a tapestry of one transformative year.

Following a run of New Year's concerts at San Francisco's legendary Fillmore, Patti Smith finds herself tramping the coast of Santa Cruz, about to embark on a year of solitary wandering. Unfettered by logic or time, she draws us into her private wonderland with no design, yet heeding signs--including a talking sign that looms above her, prodding and sparring like the Cheshire Cat. In February, a surreal lunar year begins, bringing with it unexpected turns, heightened mischief, and inescapable sorrow. In a stranger's words, "Anything is possible: after all, it's the Year of the Monkey." For Smith--inveterately curious, always exploring, tracking thoughts, writing--the year evolves as one of reckoning with the changes in life's gyre: with loss, aging, and a dramatic shift in the political landscape of America.

Smith melds the western landscape with her own dreamscape. Taking us from California to the Arizona desert; to a Kentucky farm as the amanuensis of a friend in crisis; to the hospital room of a valued mentor; and by turns to remembered and imagined places, this haunting memoir blends fact and fiction with poetic mastery. The unexpected happens; grief and disillusionment set in. But as Smith heads toward a new decade in her own life, she offers this balm to the reader: her wisdom, wit, gimlet eye, and above all, a rugged hope for a better world.

Riveting, elegant, often humorous, illustrated by Smith's signature Polaroids, Year of the Monkey is a moving and original work, a touchstone for our turbulent times.

Author Notes

Patti Smith was born in Chicago, Illinois on December 30, 1946. She is a singer-songwriter, writer and visual artist. She gained recognition in the 1970s for her revolutionary mergence of poetry and rock. Her album Horses has been hailed as one of the top 100 albums of all time. She has recorded twelve albums. In 2007, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

She has written several books including Witt, Babel, Woolgathering, The Coral Sea, Auguries of Innocence, M Train, and Just Kids, which won the Nonfiction category of the National Book Award in 2010.

Her drawings, photographs, and installations have been shown at numerous venues including the Andy Warhol Museum and the Fondation Cartier Pour l'Art Contemporain in Paris. In 2005, she was awarded the title of Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture, which is the highest honor awarded to an artist by the French Republic.

(Bowker Author Biography)

Reviews (3)

Publisher's Weekly Review

As she wanders between waking and dreaming in a year filled with the death of a close friend and the political turmoil of the 2016 election, musician and National Book Award--winner Smith (Just Kids) contemplates dreams and reality in this luminous collection of anecdotes and photos. In light of her 70th birthday, Smith writes lyrically on various subjects: she describes Allen Ginsberg's poetry--which she carries along her travels--as an "expansive hydrogen bomb, containing all the nuances of his voice." On the "terrible soap opera called the American election," she declares that "the bully bellowed. Silence ruled... All hail our American apathy, all hail the twisted wisdom of the Electoral College." Watching a Belinda Carlisle video, she's caught up in Carlisle's infectious beat, and she imagines a "nonviolent hubris spreading across the land." At one point, Smith learns from a stranger that, in dreams, "equations are solved in an entirely unique way, laundry stiffens in the wind, and our dead mothers appear with their backs turned." Smith discovers that her most meaningful insights come from her vivid dreams, and she feels a palpable melancholia over having to wake up from them. Smith casts a mesmerizing spell with exquisite prose. Agent: Betsy Lerner: Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary. (Sept.)

Kirkus Review

This chronicle of a chaotic year filled with deep losses and rich epiphanies finds the writer and performer covering a whole lot of ground.In terms of the calendar, Smith's latest memoir has a tighter focus than its predecessors, M Train (2015) and Just Kids (2010), which won the National Book Award. The titular year is 2016, a year that would begin just after the author turned 69 and end with her turning 70. That year, Smith endured the death of her beloved friend Sandy Pearlman, the music producer and manager with whom she would "have coffee at Caff Trieste, peruse the shelves of City Lights Bookstore and drive back and forth across the Golden Gate listening to the Doors and Wagner and the Grateful Dead"; and the decline of her lifelong friend and kindred spirit Sam Shepard. She held vigil for Pearlman at his hospital deathbed, and she helped Shepard revise his final manuscript, taking dictation when he could no longer type. Throughout, the author ponders time and mortalityno surprise considering her milestone birthday and the experience of losing friends who have meant so much to her. She stresses the importance of memory and the timeless nature of a person's spirit (her late husband remains very much alive in these pages as well). Seeing her own reflection, she thinks, "I noticed I looked young and old simultaneously." She refers to herself as the "poet detective," and this particular year set her on a quixotic quest, with a mysterious companion unexpectedly reappearing amid a backdrop of rock touring, lecture touring, vagabond traveling, and a poisonous political landscape. "I was still moving within an atmosphere of artificial brightness with corrosive edges," she writes, "the hyperreality of a polarizing pre-election mudslide, an avalanche of toxicity infiltrating every outpost."A captivating, redemptive chronicle of a year in which Smith looked intently into the abyss. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Booklist Review

It was a year of disruption, wandering, loss, disorienting dreams, and surreal visions. This year of the monkey' on the Chinese zodiac was also the year Smith turned 70 and a trickster election hurled the country into a dark looking-glass realm. In her third memoir, National Book Award winner Smith writes with fresh lucidity, arch wit, bittersweet wonder, and stoic sorrow, shifting in tone from lyrical to hallucinatory to hard-boiled as she describes her meditative and investigative meanderings along the Pacific coast and in the desert during which she encounters a bizarrely communicative sign for the Dream Inn, scatterings of weirdly pristine candy wrappers, and strangers discussing Roberto Bolaño's 2666 and a saint saving imperiled children. Keenly sensitive to atmosphere within and without, Smith finds herself in the middle of the unexplained as she travels with cosmic spontaneity and an almost religious simplicity. She matches the verifiable with the inexplicable and remembers her life-saving childhood library and her cherished, then dying friend, the pioneering songwriter, producer, and critic Sandy Pearlman. Smith also chronicles with exquisite poignancy her last visits with her soul mate Sam Shepherd as she helps him complete his last book. Smith's reflections on a wrenching yet grace-filled year as the world in its dependable folly kept spinning is elegiac, vital, and magical.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Smith's large, loyal following will seek out this spellbinding memoir, just as they embraced Just Kids (2010) and M Train (2015).--Donna Seaman Copyright 2010 Booklist