Gertrude Stein

Hope in gates, hope in spoons, hope in doors, hope in tables, no hope in daintiness and determination. Hope in dates. A Cubist masterpiece made up of perfect, glittering fragments, Stein's painterly impressions of 'objects,' 'foods' and 'rooms' are redolent of sex, laughter and the joyous rush of everyday life.

Tender Buttons

Stein's most famous work; one of the richest and most irreverent biographies ever written.

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

The first of Gertrude Stein's publications, this accessible 1909 volume was an experiemntal work for its time and established the author's reputation as a master of language and a voice for women. In three separate tales, Stein invests the lives of three working class women with extraordinary insights into race, sex, gender, and other feminist issues.

Three Lives

Published in 1940, on the day that Paris fell to the Germans, Paris France blends Gertrude Stein's childhood memories of Paris with trenchant observations and amusing anecdotes about everything French. It is a witty melange of food and fashion, pets and painters, musicians, friends and artists, served up with a healthy garnish of Steinian humour and self-indulgence.

Personal Recollections

Paris France

The author describes her friendship with Picasso, traces the artist's life and career, and analyzes his approach to painting

Picasso

"Essential for all literature collections . . . Several of Stein's titles returned to print in 1995, but none more important than The Making of Americans." Library Journal

Being a History of a Family's Progress

The Making of Americans

First published in 1931, this book contains Gertrude Stein's thoughts about the craft of writing. It is written in her usual experimental style, yet it is not difficult to understand, and even traditionalists will find that it has many things to say to them. Her experimental style includes such elements as disconnectedness, a love of refrain and rhyme, a search for rhythm and balance, a dislike of punctuation (especially the comma), a dismissal of the conventional significance of words, and a repetition of words and phrases. Her approach to writing is impossible to summarize, but many critics see a strain of American humor in her work, borne out immediately by some of the chapter titles: "Saving the Sentence," "Arthur a Grammar," "Regular Regularly in Narrative," and "Finally George a Vocabulary." Readers who have not encountered Gertrude Stein or who have had difficulty with her other work will find this book useful as an entry into her writing. It is also in itself a unique, exhilarating experience.

How to Write

Charlotte Brontë

Louisa Alcott

Jane Austen

Emily Brontë

Phillis Wheatley

Celebrate women and stories with these heartwarming selections from some of literature's most beloved writers in this gift-worthy collection.

Women Who Wrote: Stories and Poems from Audacious Literary Mavens

Classic Gertrude Stein poetry about, "food, rooms, objects,"

Roberta Arenson

Rose wonders who she is, asking herself if she would still be Rose if her name were not Rose, and goes on a journey in search of herself.

The World Is Round

Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

Wars I Have Seen

Objects, Food, Rooms (Sun & Moon Classics)

Mentor and guide to the Lost Generation of expatriate American writers, including Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) is perhaps better known for her Parisian salon than her literary works. Yet her innovative approach to writing and her originality of thought make the impact of her books on contemporary literature enormous. Tender Buttons, published in 1914, is vintage Stein. She pushes abstraction to its farthest limits by experimenting with words purely as words in a style more akin to painting than literature. Interested in their melody and color, Stein favors verbs and prepositions in unusual combinations and attempts to avoid using nouns. According to Sherwood Anderson, Tender Buttons "gives words an oddly new intimate flavor and at the same time makes familiar words seem almost like strangers ... For me the work of Gertrude Stein consists in a rebuilding, an entire new recasting of life, in the city of words." Often compared with music and Cubist imagery, the exhilarating prose and thought-provoking experimental techniques of Tender Buttons offer readers a rewarding sojourn through one of Stein's most influential works.

Classic Literature

Consciente de la position cruciale d'Alice B. Toklas à ses côtés et réticente à l'idée d'écrire son autobiographie, Gertrude Stein recourt à un astucieux retournement littéraire pour rendre compte des années capitales de sa vie parisienne, depuis son arrivée en 1903 jusqu'à l'après Première Guerre mondiale : adopter le point de vue de sa fidèle compagne, qui la connaissait mieux que quiconque, pour faire son propre portrait. Se dévoile ainsi, à travers de vifs et volubiles échanges, la personnalité de celle qui est indéniablement devenue une patronne des arts, adepte du Salon des indépendants, contribuant à faire découvrir nombre d'artistes avant-gardistes, notamment cubistes, qu'elle a imposés sur la scène artistique internationale

L'autobiographie d'Alice B. Toklas

First published in 1936 and long out of print, The Geographical History of America brings together prose pieces, dialogues, philosophical meditations, and playlets by one of the century's most influential experimental writers. This short but brilliant book offers a dimension of Gertrude Stein's thinking not available elsewhere. Here Stein sets forth her view of the human mind: what it is, how it works, and how it is different from - and more interesting than - human nature. Geographical History also elaborates on Stein's concepts of identity, landscape, presence, and composition. Today, as literary discourse pays more attention to textuality, to voice, reader-response, and phenomenology, Stein emerges as a pioneering modernist to whom the century is slowly catching up. For those in the performing arts, Geographical History further addresses the notion of play as landscape, one of Stein's most influential theatrical ideas, as well as such issues as dialogue, character, and dramatic structure - in a book that is itself a model of modern experimentation.

The Geographical History of America, Or, The Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind

Esta es la primera obra literaria (1914) publicada en lengua inglesa que explora las posibilidades de trasladar al arte verbal la deriva hacia la autonomía que caracterizó a la pintura europea más innovadora del decenio de 1910. Aunque en un principio fue poco comprendida en los tres últimos decenios se ha visto como crecía exponencialmente el número de escritores para quienes la indagación steiniana de la referencialidad de la escritura representa históricamente para la literatura en lengua inglesa el momento de apertura a una conciencia renovada de la plasticidad del lenguaje.

Botones blandos

"This collection, a retrospective exhibit of the work of a woman who created a unique place for herself in the world of letters, contains a sample of practically every period and every manner in Gertrude Stein's career. It includes The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in its entirety; selected passages from The Making of Americans; "Melanctha"from Three Lives; portraits of the painters Cezanne, Matisse, and Picasso; Tender Buttons; the opera Four Saints in Three Acts; and poem, plays, lectures, articles, sketches, and a generous portion of her famous book on the Occupation of France, Wars I Have Seen.

Gertrude Stein

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