M Train

Praise

“This book is brilliant. A poetic, energetic search for the secret links between life and art—and coffee.” —Henning Mankell

“An eloquent—and a deeply moving—elegy for what she has ‘lost and cannot find’ but can remember in words.” —The New York Times

“Elegiac, melancholic, and meditative, filled with wistful flashbacks and haunting Polaroid snapshots.” —NPR

“Begins in a tiny Greenwich Village cafe and ends as a dream requiem to the same place, encompassing an entire lost world. . . . Yet despite all of these losses, there is extraordinary joy here. . . . Readers who share in Smith’s transcendent pilgrimage may find themselves reborn within the pages of this exquisite memoir.” —The Washington Post

“Weaves poetry, dreams, art, literature, and conversational fragments into a phantasmagoric, atmospheric, and transportive whole. . . . Brilliant. . . . Where Just Kids concerned Smith’s hopefulness, hunger, callowness, and loss, M Train is about being lost and found.” —The Boston Globe

“M Train is a great meditation on solitude, independence, age, a ride-along with the last Romantic standing. . . . Patti Smith inventories her inspirations, and makes her house out of the life lived, out of the love spent.” —USA Today 

“M Train comes near to accomplishing Marcel Proust’s goal to follow the workings of the human mind and the human heart. By the end of the book you know that nothing is everything, and that life is a labor of love.” —Harper’s Bazaar

“[Smith] opens her extraordinary heart and soul to us, holding nothing back and never permitting vanity to intrude. It’s a gift, this record of beloved absences, to which one can only respond: thank you.” —O, The Oprah Magazine

“M Train is an impressionistic weave of dreams, disasters, and epiphanies, a meditation on life and art by a woman who sees them as one.” —Rolling Stone
 
“A sublime collection of true stories concerning irredeemable loss, memory, travel, crime, coffee, books, and wild imaginings that take us to the very heart of who Patti Smith is.” —Vanity Fair

“Marvelous . . . M Train is a book of days, a year in the life, a series of reflections. . . . The message is that living is a kind of invocation, or better yet, a form of prayer.” —Los Angeles Times