Product details

Imprint: Renard Press
ISBN: 9781804471708
Paperback • 128pp • £7.99
129 mm x 198 mm
08/10/25
Thema: FC, FFC, 6MC

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Blood on the Dining-Room Floor

A Modernist Murder Mystery

Gertrude Stein

ISBN: 9781804471708
Paperback • 128pp
Published 8 October 2025

£7.99

Free UK delivery on orders over £25

What happened, nobody saw, but everybody knew… Why should blood on the floor make anyone mad against automobiles and telephones and desks. Why. This is what happened.’

Written in 1933, immediately following the publication of the wildly successful Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Blood on the Dining-Room Floor is one of Stein’s most avant-garde pieces of writing, taking the murder mystery genre and working it masterfully into a Modernist mould.

Based in part on truth, the narrative is set in – and written from – the country house where Stein and Toklas were living in rural France, and describes the strange death of their acquaintance Madame Pernollet. The novella takes the mystery and warps it, shot through as it is with the comings and goings of servants and the unstoppable march of modern life. Reissued as part of Renard’s accessible series of Stein’s work, this is the perfect edition for lovers of the Modernist icon’s work, and a new generation that is just as fascinated by crime and detection.

About the author

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) was an American writer, poet and playwright. She moved to France in 1903, where she lived with her partner Alice B. Toklas and set up a famous literary salon frequented by luminaries including Matisse, Picasso, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway. She is best known today for her memoir, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and for her avant-garde novels Q.E.D., Fernhurst, Three Lives and Tender Buttons.

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Also available by Gertrude Stein

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

First published in 1933 at the height of Stein’s popularity and literary prowess, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is one of the most avant-garde pieces of non-fiction of the last century. Taking as its form that of ‘autobiography’, told through the eyes of her life partner Toklas, Stein’s book provoked wild debate, and was pored over for its representations of the elite Paris art scene. Charting Toklas’s early life in San Francisco, life in Paris with Stein and the war years spent in Spain, this is not only a wildly important piece of early LGBTQ+ literature, but, much like Woolf’s Orlando, which perhaps inspired it, this is Modernism at its finest.

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