My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein
by Deborah Levy· 2026
This short novel investigates Gertrude Stein and the nature of modernism through a woman's odyssey through twenty-first century Paris.
Who was Gertrude Stein? Avant-garde American poet and art collector who made her home in Paris, godmother of modernism, queer icon, friend to Picasso and Hemingway, self-declared genius.
And why does she matter? The narrator has gone to Paris to find out. There she meets Eva with the blinding gaze, an artist in a long-distance marriage, and Fanny, a sexually adventurous financier; together they cook, walk, read and argue late into the nights.
As Paris sweeps her along in its ceaseless flow, she thinks – about what we have to lose to become modern, navigating anxiety, living with uncertainty, angry fathers, making a new life in another country, art and language – how all these things looked to Gertrude Stein in the early days of the twentieth century, and how they look to her and her friends in the early twenty-first.
This is a book about how we put ourselves together— a meditation on the pleasures and challenges of friendship, desire and living with other people. It creates a portrait of Stein herself: a writer who experimented with a new way of living and who wrestled herself free from the nineteenth century to invent a new way of looking at the world.
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This short novel investigates Gertrude Stein and the nature of modernism through a woman's odyssey through twenty-first century Paris. Who was Gertrude Stein? Avant-garde American poet and art collector who made her home in Paris, godmother of modernism, queer icon, friend to Picasso and Hemingway, self-declared genius. And why does she matter? The narrator has gone to Paris to find out. There she meets Eva with the blinding gaze, an artist in a long-distance marriage, and Fanny, a sexually adventurous financier; together they cook, walk, read and argue late into the nights. As Paris sweeps her along in its ceaseless flow, she thinks – about what we have to lose to become modern, navigating anxiety, living with uncertainty, angry fathers, making a new life in another country, art and language – how all these things looked to Gertrude Stein in the early days of the twentieth century, and how they look to her and her friends in the early twenty-first. This is a book about how we put ourselves together— a meditation on the pleasures and challenges of friendship, desire and living with other people. It creates a portrait of Stein herself: a writer who experimented with a new way of living and who wrestled herself free from the nineteenth century to invent a new way of looking at the world.