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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
- Advertisments
- What Happened
- Jean Cocteau
- A Movie
- A Waterfall and Piano
- Saint in Seven
About the author
Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was a writer, art-collector, and pioneer of modernism. 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 Americans, Tender Buttons and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.Francesca Wade is the author of Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars (2020), longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction and shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize. She is working on her second book, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife.
