Product details

Imprint: Renard Press
ISBN: 9781804471197
Paperback • 256pp • £9.99
129 mm x 198 mm
26/11/26
Thema: FC, JFSJ1, 5PSL, 6MC

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The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

Gertrude Stein

ISBN: 9781804471197
Paperback • 256pp
Published 26 November 2026

£9.99

Free UK delivery on orders over £25

‘I am fond of paintings, furniture, tapestry, houses and flowers and even vegetables and fruit trees. I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it.’

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.

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.

Also available by Gertrude Stein

While some of Stein’s queer works made it into print in her lifetime, including The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, much of her more daring early queer stories only saw the light of day after her death, when Yale set to publishing her complete works. Now that ‘The love that dare not speak its name’ may be bolder, this collection aims to restore Stein’s short, queer works to the canon, and to burnish her status as an early queer icon.

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