How to Write - Gertrude Stein torrent

Not so much a "how-to" guide as an inspirational journey into the craft of writing by one of the 20th-century's most influential and unconventional literary figures. Also valuable as an entry into Stein's own writings. New preface and introduction by Patricia Meyerowitz.

Modernism was a literary movement at the start of the twentieth century that wanted to ‘make it new’.

Dispensing with traditional form and structure, some of the most challenging works of English literature emerged from this era, and its authors Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and Ezra Pound.

Gertrude Stein was herself a modernist writer and playwright who spearheaded the movement, developing her ‘continuous present’ style of narration. Among her many dense works is How to Write, a work that still challenges and provokes today’s readers.

In the book, Stein uses the English language in ways that seem unorthodox. Her syntax and grammatical control is loose, and there is no real message in what ‘proper writing’ should be. It remains a sort of text for her way of writing, with a repetitious style that delights in the abstract nature of words and of language