Tender Buttons [Hardcover]

Gertrude Stein (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2001 | ISBN-10: 1582018413 | ISBN-13: 978-1582018416

The book has no illustrations or index. Purchasers are entitled to a free trial membership in the General Books Club where they can select from more than a million books without charge. Subjects: Fiction / Gay; Poetry / General; Fiction / Gay; Poetry / American / General;

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Self-published in 1914, this is one of the volumes that solidified Stein's reputation. Dividing the book into three sectionsAObjects, Food, and RoomsAStein attempts to form images using repetition and disjointed words. As the average person will find that it makes no sense at all, Stein's exercise in automatic writing remains in the realm of the literati.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

About the Author

Steve McCaffery, poet, critic, editor, performance artist, member of the Four Horsemen sound poetry ensemble and a professor of English at York University, is the author of over a dozen influential books of poetry, twenty chapbooks and four volumes of critical writing. His works include CARNIVAL panels 1 and 2, Panopticon, The Black Debt, North of Intention and Rational Geomancy: Kids of the Book-Machine (with bpNichol). With Jed Rasula, McCaffery edited Imagining Language, an anthology for MIT Press.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Classic Books (April 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582018413
• ISBN-13: 978-1582018416
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.2 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,989,443 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars I recommand this book, October 2, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Tender Buttons (Paperback)

Stein has taken on a great challenge to break conventional ways of looking at words. Her desire to raise herself out of the "box" of literary tradition and create her own space and shape has resulted this fine book. Many hours can be spent on this thin volume, but yet it wouldn't be enough time to discover all the devises she employs. I became excited not because of her interesting juxtaposing of unrelated, and very strange yet unique, images, but also her ability to keep moving the words. For example, in the section titled Objects, Ms Stein has several poems that use repetition as a devise to create rhythm. In one poem, "A Seltzer Bottle" the repetition of "s" sounds shake up the poem. Certainly she asks us to question what a word means and how meaning can be easily manipulated, but she also is a master of "sound over sense." In "A Red Hat" she connects independent clauses, sentences, or lines by repeating a word from the previous independent clause, sentence, or line. "A dark grey, a very dark grey, a quite dark grey is monstrous ordi-/ narily, it is so monstrous because there is no red in it. If red is in/ everything it is not necessary. Is that not an argument for any use of/ it and even so is there any place that is better, is there any place that/ has so much stretched out." "Grey" melts into "monstrous", "monstrous" into "red", and "red" into "is".

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Endlessly rereadable; the best prose poem of all time, October 22, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Tender Buttons (Sun & Moon Classics) (Paperback)

I don't have as much patience as some with Stein's other work, but "Tender Buttons" is sublime. It leads the mind down paths it would never otherwise follow. I'm basically a philistine, and a populist, but this book never loses its splendour. Here (and here only, for me) Gertrude Stein had perfect pitch.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Modernist Classic That's Fun to Read, October 9, 2002

By 

michael helsem "graywyvern" (Dallas, TX United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Tender Buttons (Green Integer) (Paperback)

The playfulness & intellectual rigor of the best of the
Modernist movement unite in this small book of exquisite
prose poems that may be read, on one level at least, as
an extended allegory of eroticism (e.g. "tender buttons"
are nipples); & on another, as a manifesto of what was
to become L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry. But you don't really need
to be a scholar to appreciate the freshness & lovely
rhythms of the poems. They are like nothing else that
existed at the the time they were written (not even the
great Victorian "nonsense" poets dared to be this non-referential)
& though they have cast a long shadow across late 20c. PoMo,
there really has been nothing quite like them since.