John O’Brien, the publisher at Dalkey Archive Press in Chicago, has seen steady sales of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans for the past sixteen years.
“Given the size of the novel (925 pages) and its ‘difficulty,’ it has always sold relatively well (perhaps with an emphasis on ‘relatively’),” wrote Mr. O’Brien in an e-mail Read More
Janet Malcolm is one of my idols, I’d read her shopping lists if someone would print them. Her book The Journalist and the Murderer is a cultural landmark, it changed the relationship of journalists and their sources, giving more power to the sources. So when The New Yorker ran her piece on Gertrude Stein Read More
I was glad to see that The New York Times featured its obituary of Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) on the front page. After all, no other photographer of his time lived and worked so long or commanded the admiration of so many artists, critics, editors, museum curators and connoisseurs of photography-not to mention the public at Read More
The Duchess Who Wouldn’t Sit Down: An Informal History of Hospitality , by Jesse Browner. Bloomsbury, 198 pages, $23.95.
If Emily Post is the Guru of Gentility and Martha Stewart the Diva of Domesticity, then Jesse Browner is the Curator of Canapés. With none of the cloying mannerisms of those other prescribers of household Read More
Come all, ye madcaps, here’s Gertrude Stein.
The place to be in 1934, if you were in the Modernist swim, was Hartford, Conn. It was there, at Chick Austin’s Wadsworth Atheneum, that Balanchine’s Serenade was first seen. And it was at the Atheneum that, on successive nights, le tout New York showed up for the Read More
In July 1955, the American poet Weldon Kees disappeared and was presumed to have committed suicide by jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. His car was found on the north approach to the bridge, where it had been abandoned in the midsummer fog. There was no suicide note, and the body was Read More
Prepare for Saints: Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, and the Mainstreaming of American Modernism , by Steven Watson. Random House, 371 pages, $35.
“A Jew and a Protestant turn out a Catholic opera about Spain in the 16th century and in the course of writing that music I came into practically total recall of my Southern Read More
“The world was full of evolution … with music as a background for emotion and a great deal of eating as an excitement.” Reading this quote, which is printed on the menu of Gertrude’s, you would probably think the author was Frank McCourt, rather than Gertrude Stein, whose prose typically runs more to sentences that Read More
