{"product_id":"my-year-in-paris-with-gertrude-stein-a-fiction-9780241457801","title":"My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein: A Fiction","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e'In one short and sly book after another,  Levy  writes about characters navigating swerves of history and sexuality, and the social and personal rootlessness that accompanies both' Atlantic  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 - a writer who has baffled readers and critics for a century.  And why does she matter?  The narrator of Deborah Levy's latest, dazzling fiction 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- an exhilarating, witty, cosmopolitan meditation on the pleasures and challenges of friendship, desire and living with other people. But it is also crashes through genre to create an inspired portrait of Stein herself- a writer who experimented fearlessly with a new way of living and who wrestled herself free from the nineteenth century to invent a brand-new way of looking at the world.\u003ch4\u003eDetails\u003c\/h4\u003e\u003cp\u003eISBN13: 9780241457801\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eFormat: Hardback\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eNumber of Pages: 240\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eEdition: \u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003ePublication Date: 21 Apr 2026\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003ePublisher: Penguin Books Ltd\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003ePublication City, Country: London, United Kingdom\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDimensions (cm): 24.5(H)x14.5(L)x2.4(W)342\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWeight (gm): 342\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ch4\u003eAuthor Biography\u003c\/h4\u003eDeborah Levy is the author of several novels including August Blue, Hot Milk and Swimming Home, alongside a formally innovative, critically acclaimed 'living autobiography' trilogy- Things I Don't Want to Know, The Cost of Living and Real Estate. She has been shortlisted twice each for the Goldsmiths Prize and Booker Prize and won the Prix Femina Etranger. She has also written for The Royal Shakespeare Company and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.\u003ch4\u003eReviews\u003c\/h4\u003eWonderfully entertaining . . . a witty scherzo of a “fiction” . . . We are not to assume that the narrator is Levy – this is “a fiction”, after all – but of one thing we can be certain. Eva may announce that the essay on Stein will never get written, but here it is – odd, inventive and wonderfully entertaining – triumphantly proving her wrong * Guardian *\u003cbr\u003eDeborah Levy is that rare thing: an author who has mastered fiction and non-fiction. Here she does each with a fictionalised account of real events in the life of the American writer Gertrude Stein. It sounds impossibly chic * The Times, 'The 58 books to look out for in 2026' *\u003cbr\u003eRun away to Paris with this delightful adventure of friendship that follows narrator Deborah with friends Eva and Fanny as they cook, walk, read and ask who was Gertrude Stein? This exploration of the American poet and art collector who was friends with Picasso and Hemingway is truly a delight * Elle, 'The Most Hyped Books We Can’t Wait To Read In 2026' *\u003cbr\u003eFans of Deborah Levy won’t be disappointed by her latest novel, ostensibly an exploration into the life and work of American avant-garde poet and thinker Gertrude Stein, but at its heart, a story about how we choose to navigate our own lives and anxieties. You don’t need to know much, if anything, about Stein to become immediately swept up in the story . . . Levy ruminates on the pleasures and sorrows of friendship and how our own stories evolve * AnOther Magazine, 'Ten books to add to your reading list in 2026' *\u003cbr\u003eA boundary pushing work of which the modernist would be proud . . . It is playful, experimental, formally innovative yet also grounded in a realist approach. It is original. As Levy’s narrator observes of Stein: “Every century needs an artist to dismantle coherence as we have been taught it and make a space for something new to happen\" . . . A compelling contemporary fiction * The Conversation *\u003cbr\u003eThe brilliant Deborah Levy returns with a new novel that spills over the boundaries of its genre. On the fictional side is the unnamed narrator, discovering herself in the context of new friends, new experiences and a new country. But rising from this narrative is an exploration of a real life literary legend, as the narrator studies the life and work of the modernist icon Gertrude Stein. The result is a stunning portrait of two time periods and two women, fictional and otherwise, seen through the lenses of each other * GQ, 'The books we can't wait to read in 2026' *\u003cbr\u003eA brilliant sketch of what Stein termed a ‘lost generation' and an intelligent meditation on the peculiarly modern impossibility of truly knowing one another – or ourselves – and the imperative to keep trying * The Spectator *\u003cbr\u003eLevy's writing is eccentric, intelligent and capacious * The Times *\u003cbr\u003eThere are many of us who read everything Deborah Levy writes. Devotees will be delighted toget hold of \u003ci\u003eMy Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein\u003c\/i\u003e. It’s both aportrait of the influential Stein and a fictional story, as Levy’s narrator heads to the Left Bank toexplore the godmother of modernism and mentor to everyone from F Scott Fitzgerald andHemingway to Picasso. An enticing prospect ideally to be read with a coffee by the Seine * Gloss *\u003cbr\u003eAt first glance, the title of Deborah Levy's next book, \u003ci\u003eMy Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein\u003c\/i\u003e, suggests she is releasing another of her beloved \"living autobiographies\". But this is fiction, albeit in an inventive form, blending a portrait of Stein with a story of friendship and self-discovery * BBC, 'The 40 most exciting books to look forward to in 2026' *","brand":"Deborah Levy","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48715917787353,"sku":"9780241457801","price":45.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0502\/9530\/8441\/files\/my-year-in-paris-with-gertrude-stein_c1b92cce-4cde-41a0-a3ae-44b0dfa29a6c.jpg?v=1778977639","url":"https:\/\/www.arielbooks.com.au\/products\/my-year-in-paris-with-gertrude-stein-a-fiction-9780241457801","provider":"Ariel","version":"1.0","type":"link"}