The Gertrude Stein Reader: The Great American Pioneer of Avant-Garde Letters - Hardcover

Richard Kostelanetz has authored and edited over fifty books, including John Cage: Writer, The Frank Zappa Companion: Four Decades of Commentary, and Writings on Glass: Essays, Interviews, Criticism. He lives in New York City.

There have been many Anthologies, Chrestomathies, and Readers of Gertrude Stein's work, a multiplicity corresponding to the diversity and development of the writings she produced with such astonishing continuity all her life. In his lively selection, Mr. Kostelanetz has successfully represented one aspect of Stein's repertoire and provided a characteristic introduction which surely identifies his particular insight into her work. As Gertrude Stein says in Tender Buttons: 'a line in life, a single line and a stairway.' Congratulations all round! (Richard Howard, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet)

Richard Kostelanetz is right—again. Gertrude Stein is the great American pioneer of the avant-garde. Kostelanetz shows us Stein in all her bounty, ingenuity, and originality. (Catharine R. Stimpson, Dean and University Professor, New York University, and Editor of the Library of America's two-volume Gertrude Stein: Writing)

Kostelanetz does it again, gathering Stein's lively, liberating, and cleansing words (the words, as she says, we hold in our hands) in a fine new anthology that includes 'Many Many Women,' 'Wherein the South Differs from the North,' 'Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters,' and 'How Writing is Written'—testimony all to Stein's prescient originality and Kostelanetz's lifelong commitment to it. (Brenda Wineapple, Author of Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein)

Gertrude Stein always did things her own way, with no apologies given. Editor Richard Kostelanetz captures the contradictory aspects of her domineering personality and towering presence. He makes quite clear that Stein was a woman for all seasons and for all times. (June Skinner Sawyers, Editor, The Greenwich Village Reader)

Avant-garde champion Richard Kostelanetz collects 34 lesser-known works you won't find in Selected Writings, and these 'difficult' pieces—rejected by publishers in their time—are wild, witty, and brilliant. ... In his lively, passionate introduction and in commentary throughout, Kostelanetz elucidates without pretension or condescension. Three cheers. (Out Magazine)

As Kostelanetz writes in the introduction, though Stein died more than 50 years ago, her writings still feel fresh and contemporary. (Curve)

The Gertrude Stein Reader not only collects Stein's most exciting experimental writing but also provides a context for understanding it. Kostelanetz's lucid, precise, and unpretentious introduction is particularly useful. (Seattle Weekly)

A new collection of her more esoteric short-form writing, The Gertrude Stein Reader , advances the cause for an appreciation of Stein at her most avant-garde and unpopular. (Seattle Weekly)