Look at Me Now and Here I Am: Writings and Lectures 1909-1945

Gertrude Stein's radical innovations and continual experiments with language were years ahead of her time. This volume of her writings attempts to dispel some of the misunderstanding that surrounds her work, presenting many of her lectures for the first time. Look At Me Now includes portraits of people-Matisse, Lipschitz, Picasso, Henry James, and others-portraits of objects, her poetry, her novel Ida, and her last work, Brewsie and Willie. Her lectures reveal a precise and original scheme behind her writing, drawing on concepts from William James's theories of the aesthetic to Bergson's notion of time. Originally published in 1971 (Penguin) and out of print for a number of years, this accessible anthology presents some of the best of her startling achievements.