Year of the Monkey

Year of the Monkey by Patti Smith is a dreamlike, elliptical memoir set during 2016 — a year of personal loss, political upheaval, and the particular disorientation of a world shifting beneath one’s feet. Moving between real events and dream-vision, between grief and wonder, Smith processes the deaths of close friends, her own mortality, and the state of America with the same poetic intensity that defines her best work. The book unfolds like a road trip through the California coast, Nevada desert, and the strange territories of the unconscious, accompanied throughout by Smith’s luminous, imagistic prose and her own photographs. Published by Bloomsbury, Year of the Monkey is not a conventional memoir — it is a sustained meditation on time, loss, and what it means to be alive in a world that keeps changing faster than we can understand.