Francesca Wade and James Bailey ON SPARK AND STEIN

Gertrude Stein : An Afterlife

'Think of the Bible and Homer think of Shakespeare and think of me,' wrote Gertrude Stein in 1936. Admirers called her a genius, sceptics a charlatan: she remains one of the most confounding - and contested - writers of the twentieth century.
In this literary detective story, Francesca Wade delves into the creation of the Stein myth. We see her posing for Picasso's portrait; at the centre of Bohemian Parisian life hosting the likes of Matisse and Hemingway; racing through the French countryside with her enigmatic companion Alice B. Toklas; dazzling American crowds on her sell-out tour for her sensational Autobiography - a veritable celebrity.

This is Gertrude Stein as she was when nobody was watching: captivating, complex and human.

Francesca Wade

Francesca Wade is the author of Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars (2020) and Gertrude Stein: an Afterlife (2025). She has held fellowships at the Leon Levy Center for Biography, the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Her writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, Paris Review, Granta and other places.

Like a Cat Loves a Bird

Muriel Spark was one of literature's great shapeshifters. That mercurial quality is found in her strange, brilliant, cruel novels - with their plots featuring pensioners receiving telephone calls from Death, the devil going clubbing in Peckham and a fascist schoolmistress leading her coterie of girls astray - but it is also true of her as a person.
As sly, nimble and elegant as Spark's own work, Like a Cat Loves a Bird is a thrilling new perspective on a remarkable life and career that spanned much of the twentieth century. From her childhood in Edinburgh to her final years in Tuscany - via South Africa, London, New York and Rome - it traces a light-footed journey around the world and through her strange and magnificent bibliography. It tells an irresistible story of transformation, wit and fierce determination and makes a passionate case for this vital modern artist.

James Bailey

James Bailey is a writer and researcher from Manchester, England. He holds a PhD in English Literature and has published academic books and articles on contemporary fiction and experimental writing. His next book, Like a Cat Loves a Bird: The Nine Lives of Muriel Spark, focuses on the life and work of Muriel Spark

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