Second volume of Patti Smith memoir coming this year

Revered punk-poet-musician Patti Smith released her first volume of memoir, Just Kids, in 2010. Focusing on her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe as the pair traversed the art world of 1970s New York City, the book was warmly received even outside of Smith’s expected fanbase, winning the National Book Award for non-fiction and placing on many best of 2010 lists. Now, Smith has announced a second volume, M Train, to be published in October of this year by Knopf.

Per the publisher:

M Train is a journey through eighteen “stations.” It 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. We then travel, through prose that shifts fluidly between dreams and reality, past and present, across a landscape of creative aspirations and inspirations: from Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul in Mexico, to a meeting of an Arctic explorer’s society in Berlin; from the ramshackle seaside bungalow in New York’s Far Rockaway that Smith buys just before Hurricane Sandy hits, to the graves of Genet, Plath, Rimbaud, and Mishima. Woven throughout are reflections on the writer’s craft and on artistic creation, alongside signature memories including her life in Michigan with her husband, guitarist Fred Sonic Smith, whose untimely death was an irremediable loss. For it is loss, as well as the consolation we might salvage from it, that lies at the heart of this exquisitely told memoir, one augmented by stunning black-and-white Polaroids taken by Smith herself.

The book’s publication comes in the year of the 40th anniversary of Smith’s seminal debut album, Horses, which she is playing live in its entirety on tour throughout the summer. Since the publication of Just Kids, Smith has released one album (2012’s Banga), seen the first museum exhibition of her photography, toured an evening of poetry readings, and been welcomed to St. Peter’s Square by Pope Francis.

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