Year of the Monkey

By: Patti Smith

Narrated by: Patti Smith

Riveting, elegant, and humorous, New York Times bestseller Year of the Monkey is a moving and original work, a touchstone for our turbulent 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"—Year of the Monkey “reminds us that despair and possibility often spring from the same source” (Los Angeles Times).

Patti Smith is always interesting!

Basically a memoir, this explores issues of aging related losses and the long term value of youthful experience in processing and living through these losses. The tone is sad and hopeful, and the content consistently interesting.

Genius, beauty, transcendent

A poetic journey so multi-dimensional and equally minimalist I was in a trance as I read.

As always, a pleasure

it's always a pleasure to spend time with Patti as she rambles around and comments on the state of the world and the state of her own self with humor humility and wonder.

My heart for Sam

Sam Shepard has been a self-selected father figure to me in my life and the love that is Patty Smith is right there dripping with the same air that fueled Sam. I picture them both in their solid friendship walking pastures with laughter in Midway, Kentucky. I've driven back there three times just to feel that energy, moving down winding roads past horse farms, stone walls and oak trees. Patty floats her art and takes you with her on a gentle breeze. This is a book I will listen to over and over.. Thank You, Patty.

Her poetic expression while telling her stories.

Her deadpan style of reading, whilst bringing it home with her own enthusiastic, lyrical rhythm.