Though not the first Stein reader, this edition presents some additional selections from the works of one of the 20th century's most influential writers. It gives readers a taste of some of her less familiar works with brief comments beginning each selection from editor, Richard Kostelanetz. His introduction also gives readers a good perspective of Stein's life and the development of her writing. Many still view Stein's work as difficult or hard to comprehend, but exposure to her works in this kind of reader format, allows for re-reading and comparison, which after a time makes her work more and more accessible and enjoyable. The publisher's decision to print editions simultaneously in paper and hardcover was a very good idea, making copies available for both the collector and classroom use.

This book is never boring and rarely hermetic. It does not lack distancy and really offers a kind of detailed commentary on the content of Stein's writings. Before reading it, I would not have believed that Dante or the Cabala could have anything to do with Stein. Now I read Stein with different eyes. Perhaps a new Stein biography will be written on the basis of the insights of this book.

Gertrude Stein's How to Write, as much about how to read as about how to write, is one of the great "unreadable" modernist classics. As a student of the psychologist/philosopher William James, she could predictably want to approach the task of explaining how to write from an observational/laboratory perspective rather than as a problem of providing discursive information. The reflexive style of the book has made it something of an underground favorite (thought the fact that Amazon.com lists it on the "available in 24 hours category suggests that it is considerably more above ground) for people of a post-structuralist bent. Its value is both philosophical and mental/calisthenic. Her fragmented sentences force one back on all one's language-processing resources, providing a kind of linguistic stress-test, while reminding one of the philosophical depths of language experience. One finds many crossed wires as one traverses the field of her writing: psychology and society, orality and writing, image and discursion, grammar as form and grammar as experience-just for starters. It is one amazing textual trip whether you bus in for a segment or sign on for the whole course. And as a small cheap book it can be lived with forever.

Sordello gets a Cubist alignment, we go through a very good development, the choruses get good music, and when you want it's clear, if that's what you want.

You would set about it in this way, to form these sentences as they will come, and it goes like this: form, sound, noun, sentence. Later: discrete sentence, sound, noun. Still later: sentence, noun. What gained? Rapidity, clarity. Lost?

turned outward to the greatest city in the world instead of inward to her own rhythms, this is Stein's best book.

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

Excellent way to tour bohemian Paris. Gertrude Stein owned a bookstore on the Left Bank in the early 1900s, which was the heart of the literary and artistic scene. This book includes 5 great half-day walking tours of the Left Bank. Among the sites on the tour are Helen Rubenstein's mansion which she had decorated with Picassos and Van Goghs, and which was ransacked by German troups in 1940; the bars and restaurants where Ernst Hemingway hung out, and scenes which appear in "The Sun Also Rises"; and the studios and residences of Picasso, e. e. cummings, Colette, Matisse, etc., etc. Each site is described in one or more paragraphs. I highly recommend experiencing Gertrude Stein's Paris. (This book was published in 1988, and is currently out of print.)

This book is odd, but very lovely. It is quite in the stream-of-consciousness vein, very modernist. I am not sure how much sense it would actually make to a child, but I found it to be particularly good.

"Tender Buttons," by Gertrude Stein, is a short work (52 plus ix pages in the Dover edition) which one could classify as a collection of prose poems. The Dover edition includes a short introduction; it notes that the book was initially published in 1914.

"Tender Buttons" is divided into three sections: "OBJECTS," "FOOD," and "ROOMS." The first two sections are further subdivided into short entries: "A RED STAMP," "A BOX," "A PLATE," etc. Thus it seems like Stein is presenting the poetic version of a series of still lifes.

Stein often uses repetition, alliteration, and other rhythmic techniques. She totally liberates her compositions from standard syntax and punctuation. Words are strung together in odd combinations. Ultimately she creates a playful, even musical dance of words across the pages.

But I must admit I found this dance largely incoherent. It often reads like some pidgin variant of English, or like the writings of someone who has suffered a neurological trauma to the language center of her brain. I could also compare it to some sort of secret code language of an occult society.

Examples of the style in this book: "Apple plum, carpet steak, seed clam, colored wine, calm seen, cold cream, best shake, potato, potato and no no gold work with pet, a green seen is called bake and change sweet is bready, a little piece a little piece please" (from "APPLE"); "A curving example makes righteous finger-nails" (from "ROOMS").

The book as a whole has an experimental feel, and while I'm not sure how successful the experiment is, "Tender Buttons" is nonetheless quite a remarkable work. At times it's even fun. My suggestion: read sections of the book aloud to someone who does not speak or understand English, and ask them how the pure musicality of the language strikes them.

The playfulness & intellectual rigor of the best of the
Modernist movement unite in this small book of exquisite
prose poems that may be read, on one level at least, as
an extended allegory of eroticism (e.g. "tender buttons"
are nipples); & on another, as a manifesto of what was
to become L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry. But you don't really need
to be a scholar to appreciate the freshness & lovely
rhythms of the poems. They are like nothing else that
existed at the the time they were written (not even the
great Victorian "nonsense" poets dared to be this non-referential)
& though they have cast a long shadow across late 20c. PoMo,
there really has been nothing quite like them since.

I gave this book to my six-year-old nephew when he was starting to read. BOY did he get annoyed- but he kept coming back to it. "These are not poems!" he would sputter. While Finnegans Wake is supposed to be difficult to comprehend, one can "diagram" Joyce's sentences- the "grammar" is "normative," only the words are peculiar. With Stein, the words themselves are "normal," even banal, but the sentences are more Out There than a Zen Koan. Anyway, as the late lamented Beatle George supposedly said about a painting, "it's either groovy or it isn't." Tender Buttons is.