There is no summarizing or explaining the writings of Gertrude Stein. With the exception of her fledgling efforts like Three Lives or her funny, successful memoir, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas , her fictions are without conventional plot, setting, or character. They are intellectual flowers, each sentence growing or receding from the one before it, repeating its main points with subtle, telling changes. In Lucy Church Amiably , first published in Paris in 1930 and long out of print, Stein describes the landscape and pastoral life of central France (while writing, she was staying near a small village named Lucy) in and through her character Lucy "Gradually remembering a lake. Gradually. Remembering. A lake. In gradually remembering a lake by the shore of the lake where they were sitting." Yet Stein is not opaque or purely she always provides solid details in unexpected places, specializing, as the critic Fred Dupee put it, in "the mingling of apparent conviction with transparent nonsense." She is a central figure in the modernist movement, but her relentless pleasure in her quirky, handmade idiom can repel the unwary reader. Although it is a delight to have this reprint, a brief introduction would have been useful for the uninitiated. Those interested in Stein should also turn to her Selected Writings , or, for a painless entrée to her work, begin with The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas . --Regina Marler

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.

From one of the modern era's most influential and boldly experimental writers — a generous collection of poems, stories and plays — all dating from 1910–1920. Wide range of the author's styles reveal Stein as philosopher, poet, portraitist, dramatist and short story writer, as the investigator of the nature of language, and much more.

Book by Gertrude Stein