Tender Buttons
By Gertrude Stein
Narrated by Amy Soakes
Gertrude Stein's work flourished in a world which was finding bold new ways of expressing itself. Forms like Impressionism, cubism, expressionsism and other non-representational styles were developed that provoked and challenged the observer (as well as the established art world). What avant-garde artists did with paint and ink, Gertrude Stein did with words –dispensing with conventions of grammar and clarity, she gave free rein to word play and the musicality of sounds, without regard to their meaning or relationships. For Stein, words were as colours on a palette or as chords in a piece of music.
In Tender Buttons, she combines words with a blatant disregard of rule and regulation, indulging in a free-association responseto the images in front of her.
Written in 1914, Tender Buttons is a prime example of Gertrude's unique vision and her imaginative response to a brave new world of art on the cusp of reinventing itself.
Production copyright 2021 Amy Soakes.
Published to commemorate its 75th anniversary, The World Is Round brings back into print the classic story created by Gertrude Stein and Clement Hurd.
Written in her unique prose style, Gertrude Stein's The World Is Round chronicles the adventures of a young girl named Rose, a whimsical tale that delights in wordplay and sound while exploring the ideas of personal identity and individuality. This stunning volume replicates the original 1939 edition to a T, including all of Clement Hurd's original blue-and-white art printed on the rose-pink paper that Stein insisted upon. Also featured here are two essays that provide an inside view to the making of the book. The first, a foreword by Clement Hurd's son, author and illustrator Thacher Hurd, includes previously unpublished photographs and sheds light on a creative family life in Vermont, where his father and mother, author Edith Thacher Hurd, often collaborated on children's books. The second essay, an afterword by Edith Thacher Hurd, takes readers behind the scenes of the making of The World Is Round, including the numerous letters exchanged between Hurd and Stein as well as images of Stein with the real-life Rose and her white poodle, Love.
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