Description: "Gertrude Stein's salon at 27 rue de Fleurus in the 6th arrondissement of Paris is the stuff of literary legend. Many have tried to capture the spirit and glamour of the place that once entertained and fostered the likes of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse, but perhaps none as determinedly, and self-consciously, as Stein herself. In this ... biography of the polarizing, trailblazing author, collector, salonniáere, and tastemaker, Francesca Wade rescues Stein from the tangle of contradictions that has characterized her legacy, ... presenting us with this towering literary figure as we've never seen her before. ... Pushing beyond the conventions of literary biography, [this book] is a bold, innovative examination of the nature of legacy and memory itself, in which Wade uncovers the origins of Stein's radical writing and reveals new depths to the storied relationship that made it possible"--
Brief description: Francesca Wade is the author of Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars. She has received fellowships from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center, the Leon Levy Center for Biography, and the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and her writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, The Paris Review, Granta, and other places.
Review Quotes: "Wade on Stein is a perfect miracle. I feel like I have been waiting for this book my entire life."
--Sheila Heti, author of Alphabetical Diaries
--Darryl Pinckney, author of Come Back in September "The perfect counterpoint of subtle, elegant biographical writing with a subject who is outrageous, larger-than-life, and anything but subtle. A total joy to read."
--Sarah Bakewell, author of At the Existentialist Café "I got choked up...it was emotion built over the course of the whole book--the life of a woman artist, what it takes to be, to be remembered, to write and then to die...Maybe that is the sign of a good book--it swells you so the littlest prick makes you weep."
--Miranda July, author of All Fours "Francesca Wade's wise, humane, deeply researched and beautifully written book at last gives Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas the artistic afterlife they deserve, and invents a new form of biography to do so."
--Rachel Cohen, author of A Chance Meeting: American Encounters "'Facts of life make literature, ' Gertrude Stein wrote in explanation of her writing process; Francesca Wade makes literature of the facts of Stein's life in her revelatory, innovative new biography, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife. Fusing literary analysis, biographical narrative, and archival detective work, Wade offers a fresh appraisal of Modernism's founding mother and her helpmeet Alice B. Toklas, complicating the story of a love that survived two world wars to live on in the words Stein crafted, Toklas and her minions curated, and Wade skillfully interprets, granting Stein the "afterlife" she so eminently deserves."
--Megan Marshall, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life and After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart "In Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, Francesca Wade grapples brilliantly with a subject who famously reveled in non-sequitur and paradox and defied easy categorization. Wade's wise and elegant prose does not pin Stein down so much as illuminate the complexities of a writer alternately regarded as a self-mythologizing charlatan and a titan of modernism. An exquisite literary biography."
--Rebecca Donner, author of All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days "Narrated with grace and patience, Francesca Wade's Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife tells how Stein's beloved companion Alice Toklas, staying on alone, fostered and maintained Stein's much deserved and hard-won reputation as brilliant, uncategorizable, and generative. A touching tale of a contrary, enigmatic, self-conscious couple devoted to writing, experiment, collaboration, and to love."
--Brenda Wineapple, author of Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation "Francesca Wade's great coup here is to make us understand that there are as many Steins as readers of Stein; that her non-essential essence resides in the relays between her, Toklas, a gaggle of male modernists, a media that wanted a personality but not the challenge of her prose, and a posterity that's only just beginning to find labels for what she was doing. It's a double-coup: to track these shifts and, in their very transpositions, their reflections and diffractions and inversions, to coax an image sharply into view, clear as the lucid if continually morphing picture inside a kaleidoscope."
--Tom McCarthy, author of The Making of Incarnation "Told with grace, passion, erudition and insight, Wade's story of the iconic Stein and Toklas, their intertwined lives, writings and legacy, is also the story of modernism then and now. This is an utterly absorbing book, at once a discerning literary biography and a page-turning whodunit."
--Lisa Appignanesi, author of Trials of Passion "A thrillingly intelligent and original book. Not only a tour-de-force of biographical writing, but also a breakthrough in biographical form."
--Edmund Gordon, author of The Invention of Angela Carter