Celebrated for her innovative literary bravura, Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) settled into a bustling Paris at the turn of the twentieth century, never again to return to her native America. While in Paris, she not only surrounded herself with—and tirelessly championed the careers of—a remarkable group of young expatriate artists but also solidified herself as "one of the most controversial figures of American letters" (New York Times).

In Paris France (1940)—published here with a new introduction from Adam Gopnik—Stein unites her childhood memories of Paris with her observations about everything from art and war to love and cooking. The result is an unforgettable glimpse into a bygone era, one on the brink of revolutionary change.

Tender Buttons is the best known of Gertrude Stein's hermetic works. It is a small book separated into three sections - Food, Objects and Rooms each containing prose under subtitles. Tender Buttons is one of the great Modern experiments in verse. Simultaneously considered to be a masterpiece of verbal Cubism, a modernist triumph, a spectacular failure, a collection of confusing gibberish, and an intentional hoax, the book is perhaps more often written about than actually read. Divided into three sections- Objects, Food, and Rooms -the book contains a series of descriptions that defy conventional syntax.

In the 1950s, Yale University Press published a number of Gertrude Stein's posthumous works, among them her incomparable Stanzas in Meditation. Since that time, scholars have discovered that Stein's poem exists in several versions: a manuscript that Stein wrote and two typescripts that her partner Alice B. Toklas prepared. Toklas's work on the second typescript changed the poem when, enraged upon detecting in it references to a former lover, she not only adjusted the typescript but insisted that Stein make revisions in the original manuscript.

This edition of Stanzas in Meditation is the first to confront the complicated story of its composition and revision. Through meticulous archival work, the editors present a reliable reading text of Stein's original manuscript, as well as an appendix with the textual variants among the poem's several versions. This record of Stein's multi-layered revisions enables readers to engage more fully with the author's radically experimental poem and also to detect the literary impact of Stein's relationship with Toklas. The editors' preface and poet Joan Retallack's introduction offer insight into the complexities of reading Stein's poetry and the innovative modes of reading that her works require and generate. Students and admirers of Stein will welcome this illuminating new contribution to Stein's oeuvre.

Gertrude Stein wanted Ida to be known in two ways: as a novel about a woman in the age of celebrity culture and as a text with its own story to tell. With the publication of this workshop edition of Ida, we have the novel exactly as it was published in 1941, and we also have the full record of its creation. Logan Esdale offers informative critical commentary and judiciously selected archival materials to illuminate Stein's experience of authorship from the novel's beginning in early summer 1937, through the various drafts and negotiations with her publisher, to the reviews that greeted the book's publication. Stein's careful and systematic preservation of all Ida-related materials for her archive at the Yale University Library was a conscious decision, and an invitation for us to study the complexity of her creative process.

Gertrude Stein condivideva, con gli esponenti delle avanguardie di ogni epoca, l'ammirazione per la narrativa poliziesca, vista come gioco con la morte, imperio di regole severe sulla creazione fantastica, e perché, grazie al delitto, il personaggio tradizionalmente romanzesco esce subito di scena lasciando il campo all'osservatore. "Sangue in sala da pranzo" è l'unico racconto con delitto che la scrittrice abbia prodotto: con tutti gli elementi del genere presenti, a partire da una morte enigmatica, ma destrutturati, ridotti a nervosi brandelli di storia fissati in alcune visioni, come un quadro surrealista. Poiché la Stein, nell'anno del grande e inatteso successo dell'"Autobiografia di Alice Toklas", intendeva, come avrebbero fatto in tanti nella letteratura del Novecento, seguendo le orme di una trama gialla e frugando nelle sue convenzioni, combattere la sfida con il mistero della scrittura.

 This incredible three-CD set drawn from the archives of the BBC captures the voices of poets from the twentieth century, one of the most prolific and significant periods in American letters.

Capturing the enormous energy and variety in American poetry at this time, the compilation includes recordings of Robert Frost, E. E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Robinson Jeffers, Langston Hughes,Wallace Stevens, Conrad Aiken, Archibald MacLeish, Ogden Nash, Theodore Roethke, John Berryman, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, and Gregory Corso. Each of the thirty poets gathered here is heard reading his or her own work.

            These unique broadcasts are a wonderful collector's item for aspiring poets and fans of American poetry.

            “After spending a few hours reveling in this diverse collection, there will be voices in the listener's head . . . the voices of the women and men who shaped the twentieth century with the written versions of their words.”—Chicago Tribune, on The Spoken Word: American Writers

Autobiografia dell'amica e compagna di vita, autobiografia di se stessa in conto terzi, autobiografia di un gruppo di artisti e intellettuali che hanno cambiato la cultura del Novecento. Con quest'opera Gertrude Stein ha scritto tre libri in uno, identificandosi nell'amica, distanziandosi da se stessa (e oggettivandosi), ma soprattutto disegnando l'affresco più affascinante della Parigi artistica e letteraria dell'inizio del secolo fino ai primi anni Trenta: Braque, Matisse, Hemingway, Cocteau e tutti gli altri. E ovviamente Picasso, la sua migliore "invenzione".

Chi l'avrebbe detto che una delle più grandi e bisbetiche scrittrici del Novecento americano avrebbe potuto insegnarci come si flirta ai grandi magazzini, non senza delineare un ironico spaccato della società attraverso una lezione di stile? In questi saggi raccolti per la prima volta in volume in Italia, l'ineffabile ideatrice del "cubismo letterario" spazia con comicità da un improbabile soggetto cinematografico per un grottesco cinema muto fino a una bislacca lezione di geografia sintattica per arrivare, bontà sua, a una brusca spiegazione sul modo più semplice per sfornare capolavori. Tutto questo, naturalmente, senza tralasciare i ritratti dei grandi pittori e artisti che aveva sostenuto e frequentato nella Parigi d'inizio secolo: Matisse, Cézanne, Juan Gris e quel Picasso che la immortalò in uno dei suoi più celebri capolavori. "Flirtare ai grandi magazzini" è un libro curioso, una perla audace nata nella grande stagione modernista, dove lo sperimentalismo linguistico si coniuga a un'acre satira dell'epoca corrente, per regalare al lettore un'esperienza estetica davvero imprevedibile, in grande sintonia con i movimenti più esplosivi e dirompenti della vecchia Europa.

Poetry. A seminal text in the history of poetry and poetics, TENDER BUTTONS was originally published in 1914 and is considered one of the great Modern experiments in verse. At one time or another it has been thought of as a masterpiece of Cubism, a modernist triumph, a spectacular failure, a collection of confusing gibberish, and an intentional hoax. Despite the fact that it was written by an ex-pat American, the text of TENDER BUTTONS has had massive influence on Canadian poetry and poetics for nearly three quarters of a century. Therefore, BookThug is pleased to produce the first Canadian Edition of this important text in a publication that pays homage to the original 1914 edition.

 
At first glance, Three Lives seems to be three straightforward portraits of women living in the early twentieth century. “The Good Anna” describes an exacting German house servant; “Melanctha” explores the love affair of an African-American woman; and “The Gentle Lena” narrates the fate of a patient German maid. Yet these are daring prose experiments that reflect Gertrude Stein's revolt against the popular narrative style of realism. As she composed these works, Stein sought to emulate the aesthetic of the innovative painters Cezanne, Picasso, and Matisse. She rejected the more traditionally literary emphasis on social order and plot, replacing these with a focus on language, tone, and description. The result is a simple yet stunning view of the lives of three distinct women.
 
Self-published in 1909, Three Lives catapulted Stein to the forefront of the influential American Modernist movement, which inspired such later novelists as Ernest Hemingway and Jack Kerouac.
 
Jonathan Levin is Associate Professor of English and American Studies at Fordham University, where he teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature and culture. He is the author of The Poetics of Transition:  Emerson, Pragmatism, and American Literary Modernism, as well as numerous essays and reviews.

Three Lives is comprised of the stories "The Good Anna," "Melanchtha," and "The Gentle Lena."  "Melanchtha" is an adaptation of Q.E.D., Stein's first completed novel, which remained unpublished until four years after her death.

"Contexts" is divided into two sections—"Biography" and "Intellectual Backgrounds"—that highlight the inspirations for and evolutions of Three Lives and discuss the difficult reception Stein's experimental writing met with in the publishing world.

"Criticism" collects 19 chronologically arranged essays on Stein's life and work, from pieces written during the decades in which her work was regarded as important primarily for its influence on writers such as Ernest Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson to the more laudatory scholarship of recent years.  Feminism and form, queer studies, interrelations of race and sexuality, African American studies, and primitivism and eugenics are all represented.  Among the critical pieces are William Carlos Williams's commentary on Stein's complexity and originality, Richard Bridgman's study of Stein's work as a possible compensation and camouflage for her lesbianism, and Lisa Ruddick's essay connecting feminist analysis to theories of consciousness.

A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.

One of Stein's most revealing novels, A Novel of Thank You is her midcareer assessment of herself, her writing, and her relationships, composed in the unique style for which she is celebrated. In place of a traditional story, Stein explores the nature of narrative, its possibilities, the various genres (historical novels, the novel of manners, adventure stories) available to the writer, the conventions of novel writing, and the novelist's relation to her materials. In a sense, the novel is about "preparing a novel" (the subject of chapter 50), about everything that goes through a writer's head as she begins to write.
Mixed in with her meditations on writing are the daily events of her life with Alice B. Toklas, visits from friends - including such notable figures of the period as Josephine Baker, Virgil Thomson, Rene Crevel, and a number of expatriate American writers and artists - travels in and around France, memories of the past, inquiries into names and the nature of identity, and virtually anything else that occurs to her. She writes that, "It can easily be remembered that a novel is everything," and everything of interest to Stein goes into her preparations for the novel that is A Novel of Thank You.

Già pubblicata nei "Saggi", viene ora riproposta l'autobiografia di Gertrude Stein, che finse di attribuire il racconto all'amica Alice Toklas. Giunta a Parigi dalla Pennsylvania nell'epoca eroica del cubismo, la donna si immerge con entusiasmo nel mondo degli artisti, frequenta Picasso, Matisse, Braque e su suggerimento di un amico decide di raccontare la sua esperienza e gli straordinari personaggi che animavano quel tempo che si intuiva già mitico. Il testo, tra aforismi e humour candido, è qui presentato nella traduzione di Cesare Pavese.

Useful Knowledge is pleasant and therefore it is very much to be enjoyed, writes Gertrude Stein in her Advertisement for this Book-an apt characterization of the experience of reading it sixty years after its disappearance from print. Despite her long expatriation, she always remained in her words, firmly born in Allegheny Pennsylvania. Indeed- physical detachment from her homeland seems only to have deepened her love for the country, a passion very nearly erotic, that blossomed in this private remembrance that is both tender and humorous. War, Woodrow Wilson, Chicago, Sherwood Anderson-such is the range of her intimate concerns. As for the significant questions to which her writings respond: Wherein Iowa differs from Kansas and Indiana and Wherein the South differs from the North, useful knowledge indeed, when the thought is opened along with the word in these extraordinary prose inventions. Keith Waldrop's introduction furnishes new insight into the process and development of Stein's infamous style as always more intricately evolving than is recognized. And Edward Burns provides useful knowledge about Useful Knowledge, the kind of information about Stein's text that we rarely find when we most want it

When Stein wrote this alphabet book, originally meant for children, she planned an orderly progression through the alphabet with four names for each letter. But things quickly developed, somewhat spiraling out of simple childlike progression. Few friends or editors thought it was appropriate for children. Stein refused to alter it, and it remained unpublished until the Yale edition in 1957.

Lucy Church Amiably was written in the summer of 1927. Lucey itself is a small village in central France, located over the hill from where Miss Stein was staying, and over another hill from where the distinguished French playwright Paul Claudel was staying, which explains the references to Claudel and to hills in the text. It seemed lyrical to Miss Stein to name her character Lucy Church for the church at Lucey. This is the source of many of her names and images - they are puns from French to English.
Nothing much happens in the book. It would be impossible to prepare an outline of the plot (as opposed, say, to The Making of Americans). The action is purely interior: a great deal is noticed, digested, absorbed, compared. The result can be read simply as an account of being in the countryside, or more complexly, as an investigation into the interlocking nature of things and into the ways that language can be used for description.

The first in a two-volume set of works combines fiction with the author's personal experiences in Paris and includes the play Four Saints in Three Acts and Lifting Belly, in which she documents her wonderful relationship with Alice B. Toklas.

€ 40,20

The second in a two-volume set furnishes Stein's later literary masterpieces, including Stanzas in Meditation, Lectures in America, and The Geographical History of America, and details her relationship with Picasso and the public figures that inspired her works.

€ 37,00