Gertrude Stein

A magical portrait of the mundane and everyday, made otherworldly in Gertrude Stein's one-of-a-kind prose poetry. Objects. Food. And, Rooms. Together these three subjects make up Tender Buttons, Gerturde Stein's beautifully strange, everyday poetic observations about the world and home around her. BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days

What happened, nobody saw, but everybody knew… Why should blood on the floor make anyone mad against automobiles and telephones and desks. Why. This is what happened.’Written in 1933, immediately following the publication of the wildly successful Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Blood on the Dining-Room Floor is one of Stein’s most avant-garde pieces of writing, taking the murder mystery genre and working it masterfully into a Modernist mould.Based in part on truth, the narrative is set in – and written from – the country house where Stein and Toklas were living in rural France, and describes the strange death of their acquaintance Madame Pernollet. The novella takes the mystery and warps it, shot through as it is with the comings and goings of servants and the unstoppable march of modern life. Reissued as part of Renard’s accessible series of Stein’s work, this is the perfect edition for lovers of the Modernist icon’s work, and a new generation that is just as fascinated by crime and detection.

‘Sometimes men are kissing. Men are sometimes kissing and sometimes drinking. Men are sometimes kissing one another…’One of the foremost writers of the twentieth century, Gertrude Stein was marked for her ground-breaking experimental prose and extraordinary friendship group alike, and her works stand as a monument in the Modernist era. In more recent years Stein has been held up as a queer icon, as she lived openly with her life partner Alice B. Toklas and wrote of queer relationships at a time when this was strictly taboo.While some of Stein’s queer works made it into print in her lifetime, including The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, much of her more daring early queer stories only saw the light of day after her death, when Yale set to publishing her complete works. Now that ‘The love that dare not speak its name’ may be bolder, this collection aims to restore Stein’s short, queer works to the canon, and to burnish her status as an early queer icon.

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books 'All Frenchmen know you have to become civilised between eighteen and twenty-three and that civilisation comes upon you by contact with an older woman, by revolution, by army discipline, by any escape or any subjection, and then you are civilised and life goes on normally in a latin way.' Gertrude Stein's Paris France, published in 1940 on the day Paris fell to Nazi Germany, is a witty account of Stein's life in France, and the perfect introduction to her work.

Gertrude Stein’s pioneering triptych Three Lives portrays the lives of three working-class women in the fictional American town of Bridgepoint (Baltimore). A progenitor of the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique later adopted by Joyce and Woolf, Stein takes us into the minds of three distinct women, who are each trapped in their societal positions.

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.

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. `Melanctha Herbert was always seeking rest and quiet, and always she could only find new ways to be in trouble.' In Bridgepoint, USA, people get trapped into lives they didn't choose, without means of escape: Anna, a sweet but intimidating German housemaid; Melanctha, a troubled young woman whose passion threatens to tear her apart; and Lena, a timid girl bullied into work and marriage. In this ground-breaking collection, Stein depicts the interior lives of these women, struggling to find happiness in an unkind world. Gertrude Stein was a pioneering figurehead of Modernism, and a mentor to writers like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Written in 1909, Three Lives captures the artistic styles of Picasso, Cezanne and Matisse, and uses them to create heart-breaking portraits of working-class women.