currently reading: "The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas" by Gertrude Stein

"Largely to amuse herself, [Gertrude Stein] wrote The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in 1932 ... using as a sounding board her companion Miss Toklas, who had been with her for twenty-five years."
--Donald Sutherkand

"... The record of nearly thirty years of life in fantastically changing Paris and else where--a life passed in the most  stimulating and important society."
--Louis Bromfield

"And now I will tell you how two americans happened to be in the heart of an art movement of which the outside world at the time knew nothing."
--Gertrude Stein, writing as Alice B. Toklas, at the tail of chapter two

At the turn of the 20th century and the infancy of the Bohemian Revolution in Paris, France, young artists (like the Spanish Picasso and the French Matisse), musicians, writers (like the American Hemingway), and dreamers flocked to the house of Gertrude Stein at 27 rue de Fleurus to dine and exchange ideas.  This book has been on my to-read list for quite some time, and I finally picked it up late last night.  Stein's account is utterly fascinating due to both her writing voice (of which it is written that she took on the conversational style of her lover, Alice B. Toklas) and to her intimate witness of a time of explosive life.  The book includes some gossip (such as the young Pablo Picasso's separation from wife Fernande), but it is all fascinating.  How all of these innovatively creative peolpe from all over Europe and across the seas found her and each other, I have yet to find out.

Library call number: 920. S8192A