Year of the Monkey

Riveting, elegant, humorous-and illustrated by Smith\'s signature Polaroids-New York Times bestseller Year of the Monkey is a moving and original work, a touchstone for our turbulent times.



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, in which she debates intellectual grifters and spars with the likes of a postmodern Cheshire Cat. Then, in February 2016, a surreal lunar year begins, bringing unexpected turns, heightened mischief, and inescapable sorrow. For Smith-inveterately curious, always exploring, always writing-this becomes a year of reckoning with the changes in life\'s gyre: with loss, aging, and a dramatic shift in the political landscape of America.



Taking us from California to the Arizona desert, from a Kentucky farm to the hospital room of a valued mentor, Smith melds the western landscape with her own dreamscape in a haunting, poetic blend of fact and fiction. As a stranger tells her, \"Anything is possible. After all, it\'s the Year of the Monkey.\" 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.



Named one of NPR\'s Best Books of the Year-now including a new chapter, \"Epilogue of an Epilogue,\" and ten new photos-Year of the Monkey \"reminds us that despair and possibility often spring from the same source\" (Los Angeles Times).