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. Illustrated 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).