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.

“A picaresque voyage through Patti Smith’s dreams and life, blending fiction and reality, conjured characters and actual ones”–The New York 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).