Tender Buttons
by Gertrude Stein
Buy on AmazonThe first publisher of Tender Buttons described the book’s effect on readers as “something like terror, there are no known precedents to cling to.” Written in pencil in a small notebook and barely revised after its first composition, the text caused a sensation and was widely reviewed and discussed on its publication. This edition of Gertrude Stein’s transformative work immerses the text in its cultural context. The most opaque of modernist texts, Tender Buttons also had modernism’s most voluminous and varied response. This Broadview Edition uses the response to Tender Buttons as a way of understanding this spectacular moment in publishing history.…
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"Given my affinity for all things Gertrude Stein and my enduring admiration for the art of my frequent collaborator and talented friend Lisa Congdon, I was instantly enamored with Tender Buttons: Objects (public library) — Stein’s 1914 collection of avant-garde verses celebrating everyday objects in her signature style of semantic somersaults, brought to fresh life with Lisa’s vibrant illustrations of birds, boxes, cups, clocks, umbrellas, and other ordinary objects made extraordinary."
Best Art & Design Books of 2013 · themarginalian.org
""Tender Buttons" still seems so punk to me and, at the same time, the product of such precise calculations."
By the Book: Mark Leyner · nytimes.com