Online: Avant-Garde Reading Room

Please join us online for our short story discussion on Tuesday, August 11th at 6 pm.

We are reading Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein.

To join this online discussion, please register below with your email address, and we'll send you the meeting link before the program begins. 

Published in 1914, this work is one of the great Modern experiments in verse. The work consists of three sections titled "Objects", "Food", and "Rooms," multiple poems covering the everyday mundane, and has been lauded as a "masterpiece of verbal Cubism".

Stein was inspired by Cubist visual art and here, in Tender Buttons, she bought those ideas into the literary realm. Its first poem, "A Carafe, That Is a Blind Glass", is arguably its most famous, and is often cited as one of the quintessential works of Cubist literature. While writing her poems, Stein was employing the "stream of consciousness" method similar to works by Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. 

Simultaneously considered to be a modernist triumph, a spectacular failure, a collection of confusing gibberish, and an intentional hoax, the book is perhaps more often written about than actually read.

Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was an American poet, novelist, playwright and art collector, who spearheaded the modernist movement of art and literature. Though raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, she moved to France as a young adult in 1903 and formed a Paris salon to assemble exemplary avant garde creators such as Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Henri Matisse, and Ezra Pound.