October 2: Francesca Wade—Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife

Presented by 192 Books, Francesca Wade discusses her book Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife (Scriber, 2025) with readings from Laurie Anderson, Charles Bernstein, erica kaufman, Eileen Myles, Ariana Reines, and Anne Waldman

This event will take place in person at Paula Cooper Gallery at 534 W 21st on Thursday, October 2nd at 6:00 PM ET. Seating is limited and will be first come, first served.

Books will be available for sale after the conversation.

Francesca Wade—Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife (Scribner, 2025)

Gertrude Stein’s salon at 27 rue de Fleurus in the 6th arrondissement of Paris is the stuff of literary legend. Many have tried to capture the spirit and glamour of the place that once entertained and fostered the likes of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse, but perhaps none as determinedly, and self-consciously, as Stein herself. In this new biography of the polarizing, trailblazing author, collector, salonnière, and tastemaker, Francesca Wade rescues Stein from the tangle of contradictions that has characterized her legacy, expertly presenting us with this towering literary figure as we’ve never seen her before.

A genius to her admirers, a charlatan to her detractors, Stein achieved international celebrity in 1933 with her bestselling memoir, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, written in the voice of her devoted partner—a triumph which, ironically, only drew attention away from the avant-garde poetry she called her “real” writing. After Stein’s death in 1946, Alice B. Toklas made it her mission to shepherd all of Stein’s unpublished writing into print, all the while negotiating her own fraught role in the complex mythology they had built together. The biographers who flocked to Stein’s newly opened archive found a surprising trove of secrets which would change Stein’s image forever: a forgotten novel, a cache of love letters, and a series of notebooks which shed entirely new light on her early years in Paris.

Pushing beyond the conventions of literary biography, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife is a bold, innovative examination of the nature of legacy and memory itself, in which Wade uncovers the origins of Stein’s radical writing and reveals new depths to the storied relationship that made it possible. A captivating, brilliant work of biography, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife is a groundbreaking examination of a true literary giant.

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.

Laurie Anderson is a writer, director, composer, visual artist, musician, and vocalist who has created groundbreaking works that span the worlds of art, theater, experimental music, and technology. Anderson has created numerous multimedia stage performances, published ten books, and been nominated for five Grammy awards. Her visual work has been exhibited globally, with her largest solo exhibitions to date recently displayed at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC, and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. In 2024 she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Recording Academy. 

Charles Bernstein's most recent book, The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays and Comedies, from the University of Chicago Press, includes a long essay on Stein, as did his previous essay collection, Pitch of Poetry. He first wrote about Stein in 1971-72, reading Making of Americans in the context of Wittgenstein and ordinary language. 

Poet, writer, and teacher, erica kaufman is the author of three books of poetry: POST CLASSIC, INSTANT CLASSIC (both from Roof Books), and censory impulse (Factory School). She is co-editor of NO GENDER: Reflections on the Life and Work of kari edwards and a collection of archival pedagogical documents, Adrienne Rich: Teaching at CUNY, 1968–1974. kaufman's prose, focused on contemporary feminist poetics and pedagogy, appears in The Color of Vowels: New York School Collaborations, Approaches to Teaching the Works of Gertrude Stein, and other outlets. She is the director of the Institute for Writing & Thinking and the Language & Thinking Program at Bard College where she is also Writer-in-Residence. 

Eileen Myles is a poet, novelist, and art journalist whose practice of vernacular first-person writing has made them one of the most recognized writers of their generation. Pathetic Literature, which they edited, came out in 2022. Their fiction includes Chelsea Girls (1994), Cool for You (2000), Inferno (a poet’s novel) (2010), and Afterglow (2017). Writing on art was gathered in the volume The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art (2009). Books of poetry include I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems (2016), Evolution (2018), and a "Working Life" (2024). They live in New York & in Marfa, Texas.

Ariana Reines's newest books are Wave of Blood (Divided, 2024) and The Rose (Graywolf, 2025). She runs Invisible College and lives in Queens.

Anne Waldman is based in New York City, and is the author of over sixty-five volumes of poetry, poetics, and anthologies including The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment (Coffee House Press), which won the PEN Center USA Award for Poetry. Her album Sciamachy was released in 2020 by Fast Speaking Music and has been described by Patti Smith as “exquisitely potent, a psychic shield for our times.” Waldman co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics program at Naropa University with Allen Ginsberg. A movie about her, Outrider, has been released this year by the Tamaas Foundation, with Martin Scorsese as executive producer.