Riveting, elegant, and humorous, New York Times bestseller Year of the Monkey is a moving and original work, a touchstone for our turbulent times.
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Following a run of new yearâs concerts at San Franciscoâs 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 Smithâinveterately curious, always exploring, always writingâthis becomes a year of reckoning with the changes in lifeâs gyre: with loss, aging, and a dramatic shift in the political landscape of America.Â
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, âAnything is possible. After all, itâs the Year of the Monkey.â 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.
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Named one of NPRâs Best Books of the Yearânow including a new chapter, "Epilogue of an Epilogue"âYear of the Monkey âreminds us that despair and possibility often spring from the same sourceâ (Los Angeles Times).