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By Gertrude Stein & Francesca Wade &

Publisher Description

A gorgeous new collection featuring 26 of Gertrude Stein's most enrapturing and essential short writings--a carefully curated, accessible entry point into her best and most joyful works

Between the French-flapped covers of this elegant paperback collection, readers will rediscover Gertrude Stein as the bearer of a joyfully radical literary vision. A bold experimenter, her writing sparks with vitality, relishing in rhythm, repetition, sound and colour in its central vision: to prise apart language and association and find thrilling new ways to express the true essence of her subject with charming joie de vivre.

Stein considered her shorter writings to be the truest expressions of her enrapturing style. Her fascination with people and personalities can be located in expressive portraits of close friends Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Cezanne, Jean Cocteau, and Juan Gris, whilst her decades-long relationship with Alice B. Toklas is immortalised with shimmering eroticism. There are also playful meditations on her unique writing process, conveying her serious delight in meddling with conventions of grammar and composition.

Confirmed Table of Contents:

Ada
Portrait of Mabel Dodge
Matisse
Picasso
Miss Fur and Miss Skeene
Flirting at the Bon Marche
Susie Asado
Preciosilla
Sacred Emily
One
Ladies Voices
Accents in Alsace
Idem the Same
Cezanne
A Book Concluding with As A Wife Has a Cow
Van or Twenty Years Later
If I Told Him
Juan Gris
Identify a Poem
What Does She See When She Shuts Her Eyes
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What Happened
Jean Cocteau
A Movie
A Waterfall and Piano
Saint in Seven

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3 Reviews

3.0

Tylovesbooks

Created 7 months ago

“My rating has very little to do with the writing, and most everything to do with the fact that it just was not a style for me. I've been trying to delve into some classics and classic writers, so when I found this perfectly sized, beautifully colored book of essential writings, I had to scoop it up. Stein's style is just a little too poetic and avant-garde for my mind. I hope others enjoy it!”

Maria Hammon

Created about 1 year ago

Stephanie - Dustyloup

Created over 1 year ago

“**Important note about my rating below... These stories are... an acquired taste to be sure. Do not skip the introduction by Francesca Wade, otherwise they'll make even less sense. Many of them are portraits "painted" with words: Avant-garde expressions about famous folks like Matisse and Picasso, luminaries like patron of the arts Mabel Dodge Luhan, and of course about herself and her partner. They're simultaneously flattering and insulting. Think a less accessible surrealist/dadaist Dorothy Parker?? I can see why people were attracted to her, friends with her. There's a very spoken word slam poetry feel to her writing. Ex. Quote from her Picasso story: This one was always having something that was coming out of this one that was a solid thing, a disconcerting thing, a simple thing, a clear thing, a complicated thing, and interesting thing, a disturbing thing, a repellent thing, a very pretty thing. This one was one certainly being one having something coming out of him. You *might* have noticed a bit of repetition there and it's an integral part of her work. Just as van Gogh's style was most likely influenced by his mental health/substance abuse/poisoning or intoxication from paints - it's been theorized that Ms Stein exhibited symptoms of echolalia/echophrasia*, which is a trait of people on autism spectrum and certainly jibes with her stubborness about not explaining what she was trying to say and her gender expression as well (there's some evidence that gender disphoria is more common for ppl with ASD). Of course, it could simply be because she wanted to give these words more weight and emphasis. I think that "Flirting at the Bon Marché" is the most accessible, relevant of these works: Some are coming to know very well that they are living in a very tedious way of living. Some are coming to know very well that they are living in a very dull way of living. These go shopping. They go shopping and it always was a thing they were rightly doing. Now everything is changing. Certainly everything is changing. They go shopping, they are being in a different way of living. Everything is changing. This critique of the department store still applies to our culture, even intensified as shopping has shifted online, that belief that we can find meaning & identity in our purchases, that feeling that we can change/improve/progress, that we are DOING something by being consumers, being consumed by our thoughts, choices, etc. I can't help but ask myself the following question, even though I know it's a fruitless exercise - If she were a man, would she have been known primarily as the person who organized the salons in Paris and second for her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas or would she have been known for her writing first? Would classes be taught on how to recognize and appreciate her genius (like Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald)? Here are some of my random notes: I feel there's a secret spy message in here, like if you just remove a word, change the word order, or read it in a mirror or something, you'd understand it. (Portait of Mabel Dodge) For some reason, I kept thinking of the band King Missile as I was reading, ex. during "Matisse": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulc9Vdx8-io and for some weird reason when reading the story of her relationship with Alice B Toklas, "Miss Furr and Miss Skeene", I thought of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpwB52hdTlc . Probably due to the repetition and dischordant sounds. Two more quotes below, just to give you taste of her work, you can see how the work's quite weird, impenetrable, and perhaps "you had to be there" to get it ... One was quite certain that for a long part of his being one being living he had been trying to be certain that he was wrong in doing what he was doing and then when he could not come to be certain that he had been wrong in doing what he had been doing, when he had completely convinced himself that he would not come to be certain that he had been wrong in doing what he had been doing he was really certain then that he was a great one and he certainly was a great one. (About Matisse if I remember correctly) Bargaining is something and there is not that success. The intention is what if application has that accident results are reappearing. They did not darken. That was not an adulteration. (Portrait of Mabel Dodge) * echolalia = unsolicited repetition of vocalizations made by another person **Notes on rating Personal rating = 3* (aka it was thought provoking but I didn't love it and yet as I write this review and really reflect on the thoughts that it evoked, I'm ranking it higher and feeling better about my... Goodreads rating = 4* until this book has a higher rating than twilight or 50 shades This was a Netgalley ARC and I ran out of time to read all of the stories before archive, so I only read the first half. Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for access to a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.”

About Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was a writer, art-collector, and advocate for the avant-garde. Born in Pennsylvania, she studied psychology at Harvard and attended medical school, dropping out in her fourth year to move to Paris with her brother Leo. Here she played a crucial role in shaping the burgeoning European avant-garde, hosting literary salons that counted Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Ernest Hemingway among the visitors. She was the author of countless poems, plays and shorter works, as well as books including Three Lives, The Making of the Americans, Tender Buttons and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas - a memoir written in the voice of her life partner of many decades, Alice.