'You see that Anna led an arduous and troubled life... Her face was worn, her cheeks were thin, her mouth drawn and firm, and her light blue eyes were very bright. Sometimes they were full of lightning and sometimes full of humour, but they were always sharp and clear.' Under the grey, industrial skies of Bridgepoint (modelled on Baltimore), three women - Anna, Melanctha and Lena - live, work and love. Painting a powerful portrait of women trapped in drudgery, Stein's Three Lives is a ground-breaking portrayal of abuse and non-heteronormative sexuality, and is a searing indictment of the struggles of the working class in turn-of-the-century America. An astonishing work that toys with style and conventions, Three Lives stands as a monument in Modernism and experimental literature, and comes from the pen of a writer whose intelligence and understanding bleeds from every page.

A unique anthology of short stories and poetry by feminist contemporaries of Virginia Woolf, who were writing about work, discrimination, war, relationships and love in the early part of the 20th Century. Includes works by English and American writers Zelda Fitzgerald, Charlotte Perkins Gillman, Radclyffe Hall, Katherine Mansfield, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Edith Wharton, and Virginia Woolf, alongside their recently rediscovered 'sisters' from around the world. This book offers a diverse and international array of over 20 literary gems from women writers living in Bulgaria, Chile, China, Egypt, France, Italy, Palestine, Romania, Russia, Spain and Ukraine.

This beautiful, giftable collection celebrates both the wisdom and tenacity of courageous women who defied society’s expectations and gifted the world with literary treasures through unparalleled fiction and poetry. We know many of their names--Austen and Alcott, Brontë and Browning, Wheatley, and Woolf--though some may be less familiar. They are here, waiting to introduce themselves.  They wrote against all odds. Some wrote defiantly; some wrote desperately. Some wrote while trapped within the confines of status and wealth. Some wrote hand-to-mouth in abject poverty. Some wrote trapped in a room of their father’s house, and some went in search of a room of their own. They had lovers and families. They were sometimes lonely. Many wrote anonymously or under a pseudonym for a world not yet ready for their genius and talent. The Women Who Wrote softcover edition offers: Stories from Jane Austen, Katherine Mansfield, Willa Cather, Louisa May Alcott, Edith Wharton, Zora Neale Hurston, and Virginia Woolf. Poems from Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dorothy Parker, and Phillis Wheatley. These women wrote to change the world. They marched through the world one by one or in small sisterhoods, speaking to one another and to us over distances of place and time. Pushing back against the boundaries meant to keep us in our place, they carved enough space for themselves to write. They made space for us to follow. Here they are gathered together, an army of women who wrote an arsenal of words to inspire us. They walk with us as we forge our own paths forward.

Before becoming the patron of Lost Generation artists, Gertrude Stein established her reputation as an innovative author whose style was closer to painting than literature. Stein's strong influence on 20th-century literature is evident in this 1915 work of highly original prose rendered in thought-provoking experimental techniques.

Pablo Picasso was one of the most prodigious and revolutionary artists in the history of Western painting. Gertrude Stein was an avant-garde American writer, art collector, eccentric and self-styled genius. Her Paris home was the leading salon for artists and writers between the Wars. Picasso painted Stein's portrait and they became firm friends. Their correspondence extends across a time of extraordinary social and political change, between 1906 and 1944, effectively from the Belle Epoque to the German Occupation of the Second World War. Both wrote in French -- a language neither ever entirely mastered. Written as letters, cards and scribbled notes, their intimate correspondence touches lightly on both the weighty and the everyday -- holidays, money, dinner invitations, art, family, lovers, travel arrangements, how work goes, or the war. The correspondence has been carefully edited and is presented by period, each introduced with an outline of significant personal and historical events of the time. Explanatory notes to the letters are rich in background detail. The volume also features photographs, facsimiles of postcards and letters as well as sketches, drawings and paintings by Picasso.

The MLA Committee on Scholarly Editions has awarded "Tender Buttons: The Corrected Centennial Edition" its seal designating it an MLA Approved Edition.

2014 marks the one hundredth anniversary of the original publication of Gertrude Stein's groundbreaking modernist classic, "Tender Buttons." This centennial edition is the first and only version to incorporate Stein's own handwritten corrections--found in a first-edition copy at the University of Colorado--as well as corrections discovered among her papers at the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Editor Seth Perlow has assembled a text with over one hundred emendations, resulting in the first version of "Tender Buttons" that truly reflects its author's intentions. These changes are detailed in Perlow's "Note on the Text," which describes the editorial process and lists the specific variants for the benefit of future scholars. The book includes facsimile images of some of Stein's handwritten edits and lists of corrections, as well as an afterword by noted contemporary poet and scholar Juliana Spahr. A compact, attractive edition suitable for general readers as well as scholars, "Tender Buttons: The Corrected Centennial Edition" is unique among the available versions of this classic text and is destined to become the standard.

Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was one of the most important and innovative American writers of literary modernism, as well as one of the great art collectors and salon hosts of the period. A pioneering lesbian writer, Stein lived most of her life in Paris but became a celebrity in the United States with the publication of "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas" (1933).

Seth Perlow teaches English at Oklahoma State University.

Juliana Spahr teaches writing at Mills College.
""Tender Buttons" was recently reissued by City Lights Books, to mark the centennial of a volume that broke language barriers, acknowledging hungers to see more. It challenged with inspired daring."--Barbara Berman, "The Rumpus"
"For the centennial of this masterpiece, Seth Perlow has given us much the best edition of the poem, based on Stein's manuscript and corrections she made to the first edition. Punctuation, spelling, format, and a few phrases are affected and most especially the change in the capitalization of the section titles. 'The difference is spreading.'"--Charles Bernstein, University of Pennsylvania, author of "Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions"
"Happy 100th birthday, "TENDER BUTTONS." You are as explosive, tantalizing, and delicious as you were on the day you were born. Your birthday gift from Seth Perlow and Juliana Spahr is a beautiful new edition that will carry you into your next century, the best edition ever. Your birthday gift from all of us who love literature and culture is to buy this edition for ourselves and all our friends. Congratulations to all."--Catharine R. Stimpson, Professor, New York University, and co-editor of the two-volume "Gertrude Stein: Writings" published by the Library of America
"The publication of an authoritative edition of "Tender Buttons," with Stein's hitherto unpublished corrections and editions, is a splendid way to celebrate the centennial of this influential modernist work. Scholars will benefit from the full documentation, and readers will appreciate its convenient format, which resembles the original publication."--Jonathan Culler, Cornell University
"This radical multi-dimensional generative cubist text with the simplest words imaginable continues to alter and shape poetics into the post post modernist future. We have Gertrude Stein's 'mind grammar' operating at full tilt, with unpredictability, wit and sensory prevarication. Look to the 'minutes particulars, ' Blake admonished, and here she does just that: 'it is a winning cake.' Salvos to the editor and salient 'afterword' that give belletristic notes and political perspective as well. A unique edition."--Anne Waldman, The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics

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.

"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.

Pablo Picasso and Gertrude Stein. Few can be said to have had as broad an impact on European art in the twentieth century as these two cultural giants. Pablo Picasso, a pioneering visual artist, created a prolific and widely influential body of work. Gertrude Stein, an intellectual tastemaker, hosted the leading salon for artists and writers between the wars in her Paris apartment, welcoming Henri Matisse, Ernest Hemingway, and Ezra Pound to weekly events at her home to discuss art and literature. It comes as no surprise, then, that Picasso and Stein were fast friends and frequent confidantes. Through Picasso and Stein's casual notes and reflective letters, this volume of correspondence between the two captures Paris both in the golden age of the early twentieth century and in one of its darkest hours, the Nazi occupation through mentions of dinner parties, lovers, work, and the crises of the two world wars. Illustrated with photographs and postcards, as well as drawings and paintings by Picasso, this collection captures an exhilarating period in European culture through the minds of two artistic greats.

Sadder than salad. From apples to artichokes, these glittering, fragmented, painterly portraits of food by the avant-garde pioneer Gertrude Stein are redolent of sex, laughter and the joy of everyday life. Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

In this 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 such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse 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.

The art of Boris Lurie (* 1924, Leningrad) and Wolf Vostell (* 1932, Leverkusen) is determined by the break in civilization in Germany in 1933, which made the German genocide of German and European Jews (the Shoah) possible. Both artists make the Shoah the subject of their work in a radical way. They work - initially independently of one another - with the means of painting and during the 1950s they resort to the stylistic devices of the first avant-garde: Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism. They strategically employ collage and assembly techniques. Vostell later develops the subject further in the media of happening and video art while Lurie takes up writing. In 1964 the artists met in New York and entertained a lifelong friendship.

Written between 1913 and 1929, revolutionary years in art history, Dix Portraits conveys the deep human engagement between an artist and her subject. The artist's book unites Stein's ten portraits in prose with sketches by five artists: Pablo Picasso, Christian Berard, Eugene Berman, Pavel Tchelitchew, and Kristians Tonny. Utilizing the interplay between word and image, Stein's writing and the artists' images provide nuance and depth, balancing humor and sincerity. With a new introduction by Lynne Tillman, Dix Portraits is an unforgettable artistic collaboration. The subjects represented include Pablo Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire, Erik Satie, Pavel Tchelitchew, Virgil Thomson, Christian Berard, Bernard Fay, Kristians Tonny, Georges Hugnet, and Eugene Berman. Originally printed in an edition of 100 copies with the lithography, and now widely accessible for the first time, Dix Portraits captures Stein's legacy as a champion of artists and a pioneer of creativity.

This sequel to Stein's Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas has been long misunderstood and neglected. An account of her experiences resulting from writing a bestseller, Everybody's Autobiography is funny and engaging, but also a seering meditation on the meaning of identity, success, and America. Stein at her most accessible and her most serious. Rejacketed and reprinted.

For Gertrude Stein and her companion Alice B. Toklas, life in Paris was based upon the rue de Fleurus and the Saturday evenings and ‘it was like a kaleidoscope slowly turning’. Picasso was there with ‘his high whinnying spanish giggle’, as were Cezanne and Matisse, Hemingway and Fitzgerald. As Toklas put it – ‘The geniuses came and talked to Gertrude Stein and the wives sat with me’.

A light-hearted entertainment, this is in fact Gertrude Stein’s own autobiography and a roll-call of all the extraordinary painters and writers she met between 1903 and 1932. Audacious, sardonic and characteristically self-confident, this is a definitive account by the American in Paris.

The first publisher of Tender Buttons described the book's effect on readers as "something like terror, there are no known precedents to cling to." Written in pencil in a small notebook and barely revised after its first composition, the text caused a sensation and was widely reviewed and discussed on its publication. This edition of Gertrude Stein's transformative work immerses the text in its cultural context. The most opaque of modernist texts, Tender Buttons also had modernism's most voluminous and varied response. This Broadview Edition uses the response to Tender Buttons as a way of understanding this spectacular moment in publishing history. Stein's text is published alongside its parodies, defenses, publicity brochure, and selections from the hundreds of responses to it in American daily newspapers, which placed it in the context of Cubism, fashion shows, and celebrity culture.

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.

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."