Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein

This is really a terrific compilation--I'm speaking as a cheap undergradaute, here--because it really is all the Stein that most people will need, unless one gets into the whole Lost Generation phase (you know, getting grants to research and inspect Joyce and Hemingway's bar tabs, trying to find the last living Picasso slept with, that sort of thing) and then the books will suffice. Today is Saturday. Saturday in the afternoon winds blow. Repeating more and more and repeating the same thing this volume stricken of commas does its job. Nouns still in the way. The thing is, very few people (I hope not to sound ignorant, only honest) are going to finish "The Making of the Americans" or "Tender Buttons" (although, I must say, coming back to "Tender Buttons" after reading it, or trying to, two years ago, it makes more and more "sense," in a sense, every time I come across it the few times I have chosen it to come across me) and so it is good to have one volume with these and Melanctha and the Toklas "autobio" (Stein's most-likely-to-be-completely-read work) in its entirety. I am saying again and I will repeat again to emphasize again that one ought to buy this work this work the selected writings of gertrude stein instead of buying the autobiography of alice b. toklas which is a fine book yet an expensive book as books go compared to this book a book that is more expensive but commensurately valuable as value is. Book to be bought needs the buying.

I think Gertrude Stein is a supreme literary artist of the 20th century, and this anthology offers a wide range of her work, which ranges from poetry to essays. Her writing is difficult to penetrate, but in her case, and I rarely say this about abstruse writing, it enhances the effect. It's as if underneath words lies the human being itself, in all its feeling and rhythms, and language is a mere shadow of this self. Her words are like paths crisscrossing around the being, so that the reader can eventually see the whole. Magnificant artist. She also was apparently a good person, having befriended Hemingway, James, Picasso and others. A+.

Normally I am hesitant to give a book 5 stars, I try to save this rating for when I really really really am impressed by it, and if this hadn't been a compilation of Stein's writing, I might not have given it this rating. It is really Carl Van Vechten that deserves the stars, Stein's writing is a bit much to digest or even swallow a lot of times, but Van Vechten gives an insightful foreword and has selected a diverse array of this colorful and eccentric author's writing. I had never read any of her work before I happened upon this edition and it proved insightful to be able to compare Tender Buttons and The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas together side by side, as this edition allows you to do. A good way to gain a feel for the work of Gertrude Stein