NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Riveting, elegant, humorous—this "picaresque voyage through Patti Smith’s dreams and life, blending fiction and reality, conjured characters and actual ones” ( The New York Times ) is a moving and original work, a touchstone for our turbulent times. I llustrated by Smith’s signature Polaroids. 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.   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 ). “Deft and enigmatic. . . . Year of the Monkey reminds us that despair and possibility often spring from the same source.” —Los Angeles Times “A beautifully realized and unique memoir that chronicles a transformative year in the life of one of our most multi-talented creative voices.” —NPR “[An] unclassifiable, symphonic exploration of dreams, love, loss, and mending the broken re - alities of life.” —Maria Popova, Brain Pickings “Poignant, gorgeous—a picaresque voyage through Patti Smith’s dreams and life, blending fiction and reality, conjured characters and actual ones. She writes of seeing her image reflected on the surface of the toaster: ‘I noticed I looked young and old simultaneously.’ That describes her spirit perfectly.”  —Maureen Dowd, The New York Times   “Elegant, poetic, wildly entertaining, touching—a beautifully realized and unique memoir that chronicles a transformative year in the life of one of our most multi-talented creative voices. Part travel journal, part reflexive essay on our times, and part meditation on existence at the edge of a new decade of life . . . Effortlessly weaving together fiction and nonfiction, Smith takes readers on two unique journeys: one that can be traced on a map and one, infinitely richer and more complex, that takes place inside her head and heart. Smith’s musical career sometimes threatens to overshadow her accomplishments in other creative fields—but every page in this book is packed with enough outstanding prose to constantly remind readers that Smith is an accomplished novelist, essayist, and poet who won the National Book Award in 2010. In her capable hands, a simple look at New York City in winter becomes a flash of beautiful poetry. Smith's approach to nonfiction is unique and brave: It counts as true if it happened, if she imagined it, and if she felt it. This is a book about Smith and the world all around. And that is just one more reason why everyone should read it.”  —Gabino Iglesias, NPR   “Moving—an account of physical and intellectual wanderings . . . Smith does not rage against her approaching 70th birthday, nor does she turn away from it. She finds art everywhere, and remains a pioneer, the same rules-shattering poet and National Book Award-winning writer . . . She is, as she writes in Year of the Monkey , ‘still going about my business, that of being alive, the best I can.’”  —Jack Cline, The Washington Post “Miraculous . . . A dream-driven, reality-reclaiming masterpiece laced with poetry and philosophy and surrealism and the hardest realism there is: that of hope . . . Smith is aglow; she moves through this world as a time-traveler, an eavesdropper, a vagrant, a vagabond in the land of literature and life; she is a human mirror. She. invites us to relinquish the different names we give to the living of life and just  live it , with all its disorienting uncertainty. Reflecting on clarifying dreams, worrying for our shared future, Smith reminds us that the only remedy for a broken reality is more truth. She reaches, with a lucid and luminous hand, for the buoyancy that is our lifeline.”  —Maria Popova,  Brain Pickings   “A lucid dream of a memoir . . .Smith sees mystical connections everywhere—and, floating along on the drifts of her words, the reader