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‘Year of the Monkey’ by Patti Smith

September 24th, 2019

WHO: Patti Smith

WHAT: THE YEAR OF THE MONKEY

WHEN: Published by Knopf September 24, 2019

WHERE: The author lives in New York.

WHY: “A spellbinding memoir.
“It was a year of disruption, wandering, loss, disorienting dreams, and surreal visions. This ‘year of the monkey’ on the Chinese zodiac was also the year Patti Smith turned 70 and a trickster election hurled the country into a dark looking-glass realm.
“In her third memoir, National Book Award winner Smith writes with fresh lucidity, arch wit, bittersweet wonder, and stoic sorrow, shifting in tone from lyrical to hallucinatory to hard-boiled as she describes her meditative and investigative meanderings along the Pacific coast and in the desert during which she encounters a bizarrely communicative sign for the Dream Inn, scatterings of weirdly ‘pristine’ candy wrappers, and strangers discussing Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 and a saint saving imperiled children.
“Keenly sensitive to atmosphere within and without, Smith finds herself ‘in the middle of the unexplained’ as she travels with cosmic spontaneity and ‘an almost religious simplicity.’ She matches the verifiable with the inexplicable and remembers her life-saving childhood library and her cherished, then dying friend, the pioneering songwriter, producer, and critic Sandy Pearlman. Smith also chronicles with exquisite poignancy her last visits with her soul mate Sam Shepherd as she helps him complete his last book.
“Smith’s reflections on a wrenching yet grace-filled year as ‘the world in its dependable folly kept spinning’ is elegiac, vital, and magical.”
—Donna Seaman, in a starred review for BOOKLIST

“A captivating, redemptive chronicle of a year in which Patti Smith looked intently into the abyss.” —KIRKUS, a starred review

“Luminous…Patti Smith casts a mesmerizing spell with exquisite prose.”
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY. a starred review

Jacket photo

Media Resources:
About the book and author | Read an excerpt | Download the jacket | Download the author photo (by Steven Sebring)

Knopf. With 35 illustrations.
172 pages. $24.95 ISBN 978-0-525-65768-2


To interview the author, contact:
Emily Reardon | 212-572-2018 | ereardon@penguinrandomhouse.com