{"id":340698,"date":"2026-05-31T22:51:16","date_gmt":"2026-05-31T22:51:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/340698\/"},"modified":"2026-05-31T22:51:16","modified_gmt":"2026-05-31T22:51:16","slug":"gertrude-stein-finally-gets-the-look-she-deserves-in-this-new-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/340698\/","title":{"rendered":"Gertrude Stein finally gets the look she deserves in this new book"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In Deborah Levy\u2019s new novel \u201cMy Year in Paris With Gertrude Stein,<\/a>\u201d the celebrated British author turns her keen observational and critical eye toward Stein, a writer that Levy feels has been criminally redacted from the canon of modernist masters that emerged at the turn of the 20th century. \u201cMy Year in Paris With Gertrude Stein,\u201d however, is anything but a dry-as-dust revisionist treatise.<\/p>\n

Levy couches her thoughts on Stein\u2019s life and work within the story of three women in contemporary Paris, including Levy\u2019s fictive avatar as the narrator, grappling with her own notions of identity as she writes about Stein and her partner Alice B. Toklas. I spoke with Levy about Stein, Toklas and Picasso.<\/p>\n

You\u2019re reading Book Club <\/p>\n

An exclusive look at what we\u2019re reading, book club events and our latest author interviews. <\/p>\n

By continuing, you agree to our Terms of Service<\/a>, which include arbitration and a class action waiver. You agree that we and our third-party vendors may collect and use your information, including through cookies, pixels and similar technologies, for the purposes set forth in our Privacy Policy<\/a> such as personalizing your experience and ads. <\/p>\n

\u270d\ufe0f Author Chat<\/p>\n

Have you always had an abiding interest in Gertrude Stein?<\/p>\n

She has always been lurking there for a number of reasons. When I was studying modernist literature, I was pointed to all the usual suspects \u2014 T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Beckett, Joyce. But no one ever pointed to Gertrude Stein. She was absent in Britain, anyway. I\u2019m not sure it\u2019s the same in America.<\/p>\n

I feel like in America she certainly is not frequently cited among that pantheon of modernist writers that you just mentioned. <\/p>\n

I thought her most commercial work, \u201cThe Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,\u201d was quite enchanting. But when you start to dig into her other writing, you find this mixture of very obtuse, very violent work, and some brilliant work.<\/p>\n

You write in the book that you sometimes don\u2019t understand Stein, but this doesn\u2019t diminish your enjoyment of her work. <\/p>\n

The thing about avant-garde writers is that they either crash or they triumph. For readers, it\u2019s either someone popping a vein at the new and strange, or someone over-praising the work. And I thought, well I\u2019m allowed to have mixed emotions about Stein\u2019s writing. Sometimes she is totally brilliant, and sometimes less so.<\/p>\n

\"Author <\/p>\n

Author Deborah Levy <\/p>\n

(Sheila Burnett)<\/p>\n

You also celebrate Stein and Toklas\u2019 fierce individuality, which runs counter to the usual narratives about female authors during this time. <\/p>\n

Well, female writers are supposed to suffer or commit suicide. And the glorious thing about Stein and Alice is that the art of living was very important to them. Travel, conversation, or driving around. This really appeals to me. You know, Stein would have a roast chicken leg in one hand and one hand on the steering wheel, with the dogs in the back.<\/p>\n

I feel like Stein\u2019s legacy as a writer has been occluded by her renown as a collector of the greatest modern art of the century, most notably Picasso before he became Picasso. She is remembered more for collecting others\u2019 art than for her own art. <\/p>\n

If you\u2019re going to collect this bold, daring art of your own time, and you\u2019re buying it cheap, because it\u2019s being mocked, you have to know how to defend it. Stein wasn\u2019t an art historian. She studied psychology with William James and then studied medicine at Johns Hopkins. Through her conversations with Picasso and others, she really began to acquire the apparatus to defend the work, and that fascinated me.<\/p>\n

You write that Stein wanted to kill the 19th century with her work by dismantling and then reassembling language. <\/p>\n

She was going to write through continuous present tense. She got rid of commas so she could hurtle through time and make her thoughts move forward. No question marks, because it was self-evident to her when someone was asking a question in her writing. She really was a pioneer.<\/p>\n

Her prose reads like Beckett\u2019s, decades before his novels were published. <\/p>\n

The critic Roland Barthes wrote that all writing has some kind of behavior. A lot of avant-garde writing behaves like Stein, but she wasn\u2019t imitating any other thing. She made something new for her century.<\/p>\n

(This Q&A was edited for length and clarity.)<\/p>\n

\ud83d\udcf0 The Week(s) in Books \"Book <\/a> <\/p>\n

Book jacket for \u201cMarilyn and Her Books: The Literary Life of Marilyn Monroe\u201d by Gail Crowther<\/p>\n

(Los Angeles Times illustration; book jacket from Galley Books)<\/p>\n

Marilyn Monroe was an avid reader who traveled with her treasured library of books wherever she lived. Yet, the stubborn image of Monroe as a literary dilettante remains. Now Gail Crowther has written \u201cMarilyn and Her Books<\/a>\u201d which sets out to debunk that misconception of the screen legend. Crowther\u2019s sharp account is both the story of Monroe\u2019s library and \u201cwhat we\u2019ve projected upon Monroe when we\u2019re asked to consider that she had one,\u201d writes Mark Athitakis<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As Cuba struggles with a faltering economy and President Trump\u2019s saber-rattling overtures, Ada Ferrer\u2019s timely new memoir \u201cKeeper of My Kin<\/a>\u201d \u201cargues that the grand narratives of exile and revolution are, at their core, made up of private reckonings with irretrievable consequences,\u201d writes Mariella Rudi<\/a>.<\/p>\n

When Eagle Rock\u2019s Read Books was threatened with a massive rent hike from its landlord, co-owners Jeremy and Debbie Kaplan rallied the community around the fight for tenant\u2019s rights and started an activist organization called Save North East Los Angeles Shops. \u201cCommercial landlords [have] unbelievably unrealistic expectations of rent, and a small business can only sell a T-shirt or a hamburger or a service for what the market will bear,\u201d neighborhood preservationist Aaron Peskin told Emily St. Martin. <\/a><\/p>\n

Finally, Swan Huntley<\/a> found a novel way to put off writing her next book: She hiked to every Erewhon store in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n

\ud83d\udcd6 Bookstore Faves \"A <\/p>\n

A Good Used Book\u2019s beautiful interior <\/p>\n

(A Good Used Book)<\/p>\n

Jenny Yang and Chris Capizzi started A Good Used Book in 2017 by selling secondhand titles at local flea markets and the Grand Central Market downtown. Seven years later, after a brief COVID blowback, the pair opened their own storefront in Historic Filipinotown. Now, A Good Used Book has blossomed into a vital community space featuring a vast selection of previously loved books across all genres. The store also hosts pop-up markets on the weekends, with more events scheduled in the coming year. I spoke with Capizzi about his store.<\/p>\n

Who are your customers?<\/p>\n

Our customer base is pretty broad. We\u2019re selective about the books we carry, but we want anyone to be able to find themselves somewhere in the shop, whether you\u2019re just getting back into reading or you\u2019re the kind of person who already has strong opinions about translations. And we try not to take ourselves too seriously, so even though we may have critical theory, we also have \u201cChoose Your Own Adventure.\u201d<\/p>\n

How do you pick inventory? Is there any emphasis on any particular genres that might be popular?<\/p>\n

We definitely do the work to find books, but honestly a lot of the time the books seem to find us. In terms of what we carry, we focus mostly on classic, modern and contemporary fiction, but we love genre fiction too, like sci-fi, crime and horror. And a big part of what makes the store feel like us are our nonfiction and culture sections \u2014 humanities, sciences, film, music, fashion and design. Anything for that curious person who just wants to go a little deeper.<\/p>\n

I know the store is about much more than books. Can you tell me about some of the other community events you guys organize?<\/p>\n

During the week we\u2019re all about the books. Every Sunday we host the Every Sunday Funday Market that features two food pop-ups out front, one savory and one sweet, and four or five local vendors and artists inside. We rotate vendors selling and making ceramics, jewelry, Japanese retro radios, soaps and candles, zines and prints, and even Persian perfumes. And we always have drinks going out of our vintage Coleman cooler, too. It\u2019s a lot of things happening at once, but it adds up to a pretty easy, fun Sunday afternoon.<\/p>\n

A Good Used Book<\/a> is located at 307 Glendale Blvd., Los Angeles.<\/p>\n

(Please note: The Times may earn a commission through links to Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Deborah Levy\u2019s new novel \u201cMy Year in Paris With Gertrude Stein,\u201d the celebrated British author turns her…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":340699,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[5661,18628,18629,647,8566,15042,9342,18630,18631,14897,18626,18627,48,52,51,1637,47,50,49,18624,18625],"class_list":["post-340698","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-author","tag-bestselling-novelist-silvia-moreno","tag-book-exploder","tag-books","tag-chef","tag-conversation","tag-daughter","tag-doctor-moreau","tag-fiction","tag-garcia","tag-keith-corbin","tag-l-a-times-book-club-newsletter","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-life","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-memoir","tag-thrills"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=340698"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340698\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/340699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=340698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=340698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=340698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}