As I Was Saying

by Cecilia Konchar Farr

An indispensable companion to Gertrude Stein’s masterpiece, The Making of Americans .


One of the great works of 20th-century American fiction, Stein’s novel represents a peak of modernist filled with repetition, overlapping and disintegrating plots, innumerable characters, and sentences stretching over pages. It is an immensely rewarding book, but also a potentially frustrating one.

At last, Cecilia Konchar Farr and Janie Sisson offer a reader’s guide—the first of its kind. As I Was Saying is proof that The Making of Americans is not unreadable as charged, and offers accessible entry to the experimental writing Stein valued and promoted most—the original modernist novel by the era’s most influential author.

220 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 16, 2025

About the author

Cecilia Konchar Farr is Dean of the College of Liberal and Creative Arts at West Liberty University where, in addition to leading as dean, she teaches, researches, and writes about popular literature and the history of the novel. She is author of The Ulysses Delusion: Rethinking Standards of Literary Merit and Reading Oprah and editor of several essay collections, including A Wizard of Their Age and the newly published Open at the Close: Literary Essays on Harry Potter.