Today in The New York Review of Books: Hermione Lee weighs Gertrude Stein’s life and afterlife; Adam Kirsch reads a novel about three generations of German Jewish life; Beatrice Radden Keefe gets Gothic mania; a poem by Ben Lerner; and, from the archives, William H. Gass goes long on Gertrude Stein.

Hermione Lee
Epic Ambitions

A new life of Gertrude Stein treats her as a philosopher of language to trust, not explain—and gathers force from archival discoveries and intriguing plots of her reception and reputation.

Adam Kirsch
Things Fall Apart

Gabriele Tergit’s Effingers chronicles how one prosperous German Jewish family struggled to answer the question: When is it time to leave?

Beatrice Radden Keefe
The Undefined Gothic

At the turn of the twentieth century, a Gothic fever swept Europe as artists searched for meaning in a lost age.

Wars of Religion

a poem by
Ben Lerner

It is a problem of organization, angels
In their syndicates look down, elites
Have always looked down on us, she said,
But if everyone refuses to die
Simultaneously, a kind of general strike
Then they will have no choice
But to come to the table, she said, striking…

Free from the Archives

In our February 12 issue, Hermione Lee writes about a new biography of Gertrude Stein, by Francesca Wade, “that will forever be an essential tool for anyone studying” the modernist writer. For some readers, Lee says, Stein may be on a knife-edge between “the most remarkable creative experimentalist of her century” and “a ludicrously self-inflated, intolerably repetitive, and dead-end mannerist.”

In the Review’s May 3 and May 17, 1973, issues, William H. Gass—decidedly in the former camp regarding Stein’s talents—wrote a two-part essay about her, arguing that she was possessed of “revolutionary zeal” while on a “restless quest for truth [that] would cause her to render some aspects of reality with a ruthlessness rare in any writer, and at a greater risk to her art than most.”

William H. Gass
Gertrude Stein, Geographer: I

“[In Stein’s Three Lives] the rhythms, the rhymes, the heavy monosyllabic beat, the skillful rearrangements of normal order, the carefully controlled pace, the running on, the simplicity, exactness, the passion…in the history of language no one had written like this before, and the result was as striking in its way, and as successful, as Ulysses was to be.”

William H. Gass
Gertrude Stein, Geographer: II

“Gertrude Stein did more with sentences, and understood them better, than any other writer ever has. Not all her manipulations are successful, but even at their worst, most boring, most mechanical, they are wonderfully informative. And constantly she thought of them as things in space, as long and wiggling and physical as worms.”

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