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My year in paris with gertrude stein
Not yet published
Expected 15 Apr 26In contemporary Paris, a narrator and two companions explore the life and work of Gertrude 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 20th century. There are the 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” (The New York Times), 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.
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 20th century. There are the 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” (The New York Times), 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.
208 pages, Paperback
Expected publication April 15, 2026
1348 people want to read
About the author
Deborah Levy
65 books3,790 followersDeborah Levy trained at Dartington College of Arts leaving in 1981 to write a number of plays, highly acclaimed for their "intellectual rigour, poetic fantasy and visual imagination", including PAX, HERESIES for the Royal Shakespeare Company, CLAM, CALL BLUE JANE, SHINY NYLON, HONEY BABY MIDDLE ENGLAND, PUSHING THE PRINCE INTO DENMARK and MACBETH-FALSE MEMORIES, some of which are published in LEVY: PLAYS 1 (Methuen)
Deborah wrote and published her first novel BEAUTIFUL MUTANTS (Vintage), when she was 27 years old. The experience of not having to give her words to a director, actors and designer to interpret, was so exhilarating, she wrote a few more. These include, SWALLOWING GEOGRAPHY, THE UNLOVED (Vintage) and BILLY and GIRL (Bloomsbury). She has always written across a number of art forms (see Bookworks and Collaborations with visual artists) and was Fellow in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1989-1991.
Deborah wrote and published her first novel BEAUTIFUL MUTANTS (Vintage), when she was 27 years old. The experience of not having to give her words to a director, actors and designer to interpret, was so exhilarating, she wrote a few more. These include, SWALLOWING GEOGRAPHY, THE UNLOVED (Vintage) and BILLY and GIRL (Bloomsbury). She has always written across a number of art forms (see Bookworks and Collaborations with visual artists) and was Fellow in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1989-1991.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 28, 2026
“Meanwhile, bombs are falling through the twenty-first century upon the living and the soon-to-be dead.”
Deborah Levy seems to be the only intellectual cosmically qualified for the job of interrogating the life of Gertrude Stein from her current place in history decades upstream. As with all of her books, in My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein, Deborah Levy creates a separate realm that exists in both body and mind, the real and the surreal. She drags her hand (and pen) across the border where realism ends, where otherworldly wisdom is waiting to break through and to be channeled by the right writer. Along with Deborah Levy's unique writing and sharp perception, she delivers a thorough biography of Gertrude Stein despite her opaqueness. Only Deborah Levy could do it.
Deborah Levy seems to be the only intellectual cosmically qualified for the job of interrogating the life of Gertrude Stein from her current place in history decades upstream. As with all of her books, in My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein, Deborah Levy creates a separate realm that exists in both body and mind, the real and the surreal. She drags her hand (and pen) across the border where realism ends, where otherworldly wisdom is waiting to break through and to be channeled by the right writer. Along with Deborah Levy's unique writing and sharp perception, she delivers a thorough biography of Gertrude Stein despite her opaqueness. Only Deborah Levy could do it.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Yet, is that not what literature is for? To search the hills for greater meaning hiding in plain sight?
Deborah Levy on Gertrude Stein? Absolutely irresistible!
It's interesting that the very title insists on this being fiction as the voice reminded me throughout of that in Levy's living biography series that started with Things I Don't Want to Know. There's a similar intimacy, a sense of the lively mind behind the words, the adventurousness (here living in Paris for a year), the wit and the pressing, probing intelligence that makes connections as it roves over divergent material.
While the narrator is in Paris researching an essay on Stein, the book itself explores almost-contemporary Paris and the friendship of three women there: Eva, Fanny and the narrator herself. The narrative coalesces around ideas of what is lost, a refrain throughout the book: a cat, a potential love interest, but also the things that need to be lost in order for the self to come into its own: Alice B. Toklas' obligated smile, Stein's acceptance of society's rules for women and what femininity is supposed to look and behave like.
Stein ends up a kind of muse for the narrator's own meditations on her relationships with the other women, with her work, with writing and with that sense of the self as a being always under construction, losing and building, moment by moment. That may sound earnest but this book isn't even while it deals with the crux of what living a good life might mean: it's humorous and engaged, as interested in red-soled stilettos and French cheeses and home-made peach brandy (from an Alice B. Toklas recipe) as it is in more serious matters - indeed, it gently asserts that the serious aspects of life are constructed from these small everyday interests and concerns, that friendships and relationship are embedded in cigarettes tucked into a belt, shared meals and bickering over the name of a lost cat.
This is exactly the sort of book that Levy writes so well: I can see myself coming back to this again in the future, as more will be uncovered on repeat readings.
Many thanks to Penguin for an ARC via NetGalley
January 22, 2026
Loved the blend of fiction and non-fiction, as well as the setting in Paris. A great read
February 9, 2026
“Get rid of commas. Get rid of question marks. She did not want to be told when to take a breath and when something was a question or who to love or how to dress.”
Thank you so much Penguin Hamish Hamilton for sending me this wonderful proof. Out 16th April 2026!
My year in Paris with Gertrude Stein is a tender, wholly thought provoking and beautifully unique book. I went into this not knowing quite what to expect, with a relatively limited knowledge not just of Stein, but of modernism itself, and this narrative has left me longing to know more about the transformative voices of this era and how an entirely new way of looking at language and thus life was born.
This is a story that blends both the real and the imagined, and it does so with startling brilliance and clarity. Levy’s narrator travels to Paris to tirelessly acquaint herself with the work and life of Gertrude Stein, described wonderfully in the blurb as being the avant-garde American poet and art collector, godmother of modernism, self-declared genius, friend to Picasso and Hemingway, and queer icon.
What initially begins as a research project, transforms into an awe-inspiring journey of self-discovery, friendship, desire, amidst the undeniable richness of cosmopolitan living, as Paris sweeps our narrator into the underbelly of a city teeming with art, literature and culture.
As the story unravelled, I found myself growing progressively more intrigued and inspired by Stein’s life, as it became apparent that her way of living and viewing the world was not only ahead of her time, but brimming with wonder, uniqueness and rebellion.
Stein strikes me as being a fearless, eccentric and defiant woman, and a pioneer in language and linguistics, paving the way for writers and academics who have followed in her footsteps since the nineteenth century and beyond.
Thank you so much Penguin Hamish Hamilton for sending me this wonderful proof. Out 16th April 2026!
My year in Paris with Gertrude Stein is a tender, wholly thought provoking and beautifully unique book. I went into this not knowing quite what to expect, with a relatively limited knowledge not just of Stein, but of modernism itself, and this narrative has left me longing to know more about the transformative voices of this era and how an entirely new way of looking at language and thus life was born.
This is a story that blends both the real and the imagined, and it does so with startling brilliance and clarity. Levy’s narrator travels to Paris to tirelessly acquaint herself with the work and life of Gertrude Stein, described wonderfully in the blurb as being the avant-garde American poet and art collector, godmother of modernism, self-declared genius, friend to Picasso and Hemingway, and queer icon.
What initially begins as a research project, transforms into an awe-inspiring journey of self-discovery, friendship, desire, amidst the undeniable richness of cosmopolitan living, as Paris sweeps our narrator into the underbelly of a city teeming with art, literature and culture.
As the story unravelled, I found myself growing progressively more intrigued and inspired by Stein’s life, as it became apparent that her way of living and viewing the world was not only ahead of her time, but brimming with wonder, uniqueness and rebellion.
Stein strikes me as being a fearless, eccentric and defiant woman, and a pioneer in language and linguistics, paving the way for writers and academics who have followed in her footsteps since the nineteenth century and beyond.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews