Just finished Janet Malcolm’s gripping and sympathetic Someone Says Yes to It ,which begins as an overdue exegesis of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans before veering into a sympathetic portrait of the writer and her technique, concluding with a bang-up tale of academic intrigue. Alas, the piece does not appear online that I could uncover.

It appears in the New Yorker issue dated June 13 and 20, 2005.

The piece communicated to me what two years of intensive art historical information failed to regarding Stein’s appeal to the moderns, and as it was surely intended to, awakened a personal sense of interest in the famously hard-to-read writer’s work.