Year Of The Monkey
by Patti Smith
Buy on AmazonYear of the Monkey is a 2019 memoir by Patti Smith. The work describes a single year in Smith's life, 2016, which she spent traveling on her own. The book is part travelogue and part dream journal, as Smith often interrupts the narrative to describe her dreams.
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"That is what Patti Smith offers with uncommon elegance of thought and feeling in Year of the Monkey — a dream-driven, reality-reclaiming masterpiece, laced with poetry and philosophy and surrealism and the hardest realism there is: that of hope."
Best Books of 2019 · themarginalian.org
"Patti Smith calmly, sadly traces the foggy outline of a liminal and pernicious year, 2016, which delivered changes both personal – the declining health of playwright and actor Sam Shepard, the death of music producer Sandy Pearlman – and global. In this slim volume, Smith glides through her dreamlike world as a famous spirit might, performing, writing, reading, drinking coffee and a very occasional sip of alcohol. “I tried to shrug off unease, do my work, say my prayers, bide my time,” she writes near the dead-middle of the book, in which she does exactly that in her way, exactly."
NPR Books We Love — 2019 · apps.npr.org