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Review Quotes: "Deborah Levy pulls off something wonderful . . . A delightful amalgam of a highly subjective literary biography and an urban caper in the City of Light, brightly seasoned with wit, wisdom and insightful literary criticism . . . With My Year in Paris, Deborah Levy has produced another fresh, stimulating book about attempting to find the 'there there, ' not just in Gertrude Stein but in life and literature." --Marc Weingarten, Los Angeles Times "In the hands of a master of her craft--a true successor to Stein--the voices of the narrator and her subject merge into one. You are what you read." --Emily Watlington, Art in America "As ever, Levy's writing is subtle and wry . . . There is a cadence to these sentences, which move at the speed of ordinary life but showcase Levy's careful attention to the world around her . . . Language, with all its playfulness, risk, and tender beauty, is the very essence of My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein. This seems an obvious point to make--Levy is a writer, after all--but clearly, some writers have more fun with words than others do. Levy uses language to dismantle and reimagine, to make the familiar seem novel and shiny." --Grace Linden, Los Angeles Review of Books "A lighthearted, free-associative novel about female friendship and literary inspiration. With the insight and curiosity that characterize her fiction ( Hot Milk, Swimming Home) and her acclaimed memoirs, Levy examines rootlessness and expatriation, partnership and friendship, freedom and devotion to one's art. --Julie Phillips, 4Columns "The clue is in the subtitle--'A Fiction'--but, as with all of Deborah Levy's lucid, elegant, wise and often slyly, dryly humorous work, this book is not not about the writer Gertrude Stein . . . Her use of language is precise, honed, entirely her own, delivering quick truths and observations that catch you off the cuff and dazzle." --Emily LaBarge, The Nerve "Levy's writing [is] eccentric, intelligent, and capacious." --Susie Goldsbrough, The Times "Levy, like Stein, is ambiguous. Like Stein, she plays with language and her sentences dazzle, yet their intent is much clearer. She both inhabits and challenges her subject . . . As a novel, it is as indomitable and earthy as Stein, yet elegant and piercing as only Levy can be." --Catherine Taylor, The Times Literary Supplement "The brilliant Deborah Levy returns with a new novel that spills over the boundaries of its genre. On the fictional side is the unnamed narrator, discovering herself in the context of new friends, new experiences and a new country. But rising from this narrative is an exploration of a real life literary legend, as the narrator studies the life and work of the modernist icon Gertrude Stein. The result is a stunning portrait of two time periods and two women, fictional and otherwise, seen through the lenses of each other." ―GQ " Deborah Levy is that rare thing: an author who has mastered fiction and non-fiction. Here she does each with a fictionalised account of real events in the life of the American writer Gertrude Stein. It sounds impossibly chic." ―The Times "Run away to Paris with this delightful adventure of friendship that follows narrator Deborah with friends Eva and Fanny as they cook, walk, read and ask who was Gertrude Stein? . . . Truly a delight." ―Elle "Levy's writing is eccentric, intelligent and capacious." ―Susie Goldsbrough, The Times "A witty scherzo of a 'fiction' . . . Eva may announce that the essay on Stein will never get written, but here it is-- odd, inventive and wonderfully entertaining--triumphantly proving her wrong." ―Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Guardian "Fans of Deborah Levy won't be disappointed by her latest novel, ostensibly an exploration into the life and work of American avant-garde poet and thinker Gertrude Stein, but at its heart, a story about how we choose to navigate our own lives and anxieties. You don't need to know much, if anything, about Stein to become immediately swept up in the story . . . Levy ruminates on the pleasures and sorrows of friendship and how our own stories evolve." ―Martha Alexander, AnOther Magazine "A boundary pushing work of which the modernist would be proud . . . It is playful, experimental, formally innovative yet also grounded in a realist approach. It is original . . . A compelling contemporary fiction." ―Robin Styles, The Conversation " Levy is one of few writers who find fresh ways to astonish with each project. . . [ My Year in Paris] promises more of that Levy wizardry: bold structural swings and a freewheeling spirit." -- Lit Hub (Most Anticipated) "An inventive meld of biography and novel . . . What emerges is a persuasive portrait of Stein--unfettered by corsets, curiously magnetic to men despite her queerness, a self-proclaimed genius who wanted to 'excavate the future' . . . [A] short, witty, intriguing work. A beguiling genre-splicer, strewn with questions and some answers." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "The novel comes alive in the narrator's riveting efforts to grapple with Stein's idiosyncratic life and work. There's much to admire." --Publishers Weekly Biographical Note: Deborah Levy writes fiction, plays, and poetry. Her work has been staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company, broadcast on the BBC, and translated widely. She is the author of several highly praised novels, including August Blue, The Man Who Saw Everything (long-listed for the Booker Prize), Hot Milk and Swimming Home (both Man Booker Prize finalists), The Unloved, and Billy and Girl; the acclaimed story collection Black Vodka; a three-part autobiography, Things I Don't Want to Know, The Cost of Living, and Real Estate; and, most recently, the collection The Position of Spoons: And Other Intimacies. She lives in London and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Publisher Marketing: Long-listed for the American Library in Paris Book Award In contemporary Paris, a narrator and two companions explore the life and work of Gertrude Stein: a subversive imagining of a truly subversive female artist. Our narrator has a lot going on. Her friend Eva's cat is missing--also, she wonders, where is Eva's husband. Their other friend Fanny is barely around, and not because of her job in finance; she is tangled up with no less than three lovers. And Gertrude Stein is ruining the narrator's life. She is trying to write an essay about Stein but it seems impossible. She knows too much and nothing at all about the leading avant-garde thinker of the early twentieth century. There are the facts: Gertrude Stein studied psychology at Harvard and medicine at Johns Hopkins, then quit; curated modern art in her rented apartment that would shake the world; wrote novels, plays, poetry, and libretti that are incoherent and brilliant; felt love at first sight for her daring wife, the subject of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. But so much is out of reach. How do we put ourselves together? What do we lose to become modern? What do we find beyond the limits of language? Only a book like this, only a book by Deborah Levy, "an indelible writer [and] elliptical genius" (Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review), could attempt such an investigation. It crashes through genre to form something distinctively, utterly new--an imaginative, entertaining, and scholarly manifestation befitting the genius at its center. This is My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein.Review Citations:
Contributor Bio:Levy, Deborah |
My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein: A Fiction
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