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

"In a time of war, dirty air, missile worship when all oracles seem silenced, from every eco-lyric pore these fine auroras of "This Connection of Everyone With Lungs have been streaming. Registering 9/11 as cellular rupture, this is a work of full globality which redeems our time, makes us remember all that poetry is capable of as form, frame, syntax linking air, earth, lung; what Emerson meant by lyric language as nothing less than externalization of planet's soul."--Rob Wilson, author of "Waking in Seoul "By listing, by naming, the atrocities--the harrowing stats, the scary particulars--in our world-at-endless-war--we might at least exert control over our sanity and extend our mind and compassion to others. It is a connected universe as Spahr so forcefully and powerfully reminds us. "This Connection of Everyone with Lungs is a sustained and anaphoric meditation, a catharsis for our predicament."--Anne Waldman

"This experimental work is not for the faint of heart, but it is laced with meditations that will appeal to readers concerned with poetry's role in the world."--Publishers Weekly "I am fascinated by their attention to inequality, to questions of violence and community: something borne out by the collaboration itself."--Bhana Kapil's Best Books of 2013 on The Volta "An Army of Lovers explores the liminal spaces where cities and individuals come together and stand apart with strange, brainy grace."--Michelle Tea, author of Mermaid in Chelsea Creek "By means of a series of stylistically and tonally various prose segments (by turns reflexive and dialogic, ironic and depressive, unhinged and hallucinatory, wetly emotional and dryly wry, including a detournement of a Raymond Carver story), the book centers, emotionally, on the ebb and flow of what it calls 'struggle-force.' Signature drone strikes, torture, ecological collapse, environmental illness and chronic fatigue syndrome: it's all connected." --Miranda Mellis, Rain Taxi "The book offers many ways of approaching the age-old questions What makes something art and What makes someone a decent citizen, as well as (if not primarily) exploring the ways in which the answers to these questions might intersect. More impressively, it does so without being didactic and yet without being obscure, as so many efforts at high-concept art tend to be."--Evan Karp, SF Weekly "Fantastical, lyrical, whimsical and wildly experimental, An Army of Lovers is as serious as it is absurd."--Christopher Higgs, HTMLGIANT "Authors who co-write often produce two halves that refuse to coalesce, but East Bay poets Juliana Spahr and David Buuck fuse with fantastic results in this short experimental novel. It's the story of Demented Panda and Koki, two poets united by a desire to write politically engaged works. Wounded, bored, inspired and skeptical, they soldier on through a landscape of toxic spills, consumer excess, odd juxtapositions and trance states." --Georgia Rowe, San Jose Mercury News "Authors Spahr and Buuck, who appear in this novel as Bay Area poets 'Koki' and 'Demented Panda,' style it up all the way from magical realism to 'new journalism' and Raymond Carver Cathedralspeak, but it's the weary 'I can't go on. I'll go on' optimism at which wounded veterans of the army of lovers excel. Theirs is a rigorous book, and a book of marvels, with something funny, something painful, stirring on every page."--Kevin Killian, author of Spreadeagle "This picaresque story about the 'particular lostness' of poetry, the ways poems always win and the lives of self-described 'mediocre' poets is actually pretty hilarious! It's also smart, incisive and politically astute. Now, to the barricades!"--Rebecca Brown, author of American Romances: Essays An Army of Lovers begins with the story of two poets, Demented Panda and Koki, united in their desire to write politically engaged poetry at a time when poetry seems to have lost its ability to effect social change. Their first project is more than a failure, resulting in a spell that unleashes a torrent of raw sewage and surrealistic embodiments of consumerist excess and black site torture techniques. Subsequent chapters feature an experimental composer (Koki?) and a performance artist (Panda?) whose bodies are literally invaded with the ills of capitalism, manifested through leaking blisters and other maladies, as well as a radical remix of a Raymond Carver story, questioning "What We Talk About When We Talk About Poetry." The novel concludes with Panda and Koki returning to the site of their failed collaboration to conjure up a more utopian vision of "an army of lovers." Fantastical, lyrical, whimsical and wildly experimental, An Army of Lovers is as serious as it is absurd.

In 1956 W. E. B. Du Bois was denied a passport to attend the Presence Africaine Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris. So he sent the assembled a telegram. "Any Negro-American who travels abroad today must either not discuss race conditions in the United States or say the sort of thing which our State Department wishes the world to believe." Taking seriously Du Bois's allegation, Juliana Spahr breathes new life into age-old questions as she explores how state interests have shaped U.S. literature. What is the relationship between literature and politics? Can writing be revolutionary? Can art be autonomous, or is escape from nations and nationalisms impossible? Du Bois's Telegram brings together a wide range of institutional forces implicated in literary production, paying special attention to three eras of writing that sought to defy political orthodoxies by contesting linguistic conventions: avant-garde modernism of the early twentieth century; social-movement writing of the 1960s and 1970s; and, in the twenty-first century, the profusion of English-language works incorporating languages other than English. Spahr shows how these literatures attempted to assert their autonomy, only to be shut down by FBI harassment or coopted by CIA and State Department propagandists. Liberal state allies such as the Ford and Rockefeller foundations made writers complicit by funding multiculturalist works that celebrated diversity and assimilation while starving radical anti-imperial, anti-racist, anti-capitalist efforts. Spahr does not deny the exhilarations of politically engaged art. But her study affirms a sobering reality: aesthetic resistance is easily domesticated.