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Brewsie and Willie
Gertrude Stein’s 1946 novella Brewsie and Willie explores and articulates the anxieties of a group of young American soldiers and nurses caught in the limbo between the end of the World War II and their return home to civilian life.
- GenresLiteratureFiction
128 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1946
About the author
Gertrude Stein
322 books1,070 followersGertrude Stein was an American writer who spent most of her life in France, and who became a catalyst in the development of modern art and literature. Her life was marked by two primary relationships, the first with her brother Leo Stein, from 1874-1914, and the second with Alice B. Toklas, from 1907 until Stein's death in 1946. Stein shared her salon at 27 rue de Fleurus, Paris, first with Leo and then with Alice. Throughout her lifetime, Stein cultivated significant tertiary relationships with well-known members of the avant garde artistic and literary world of her time.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
December 12, 2011
much like Lady Gaga and Cher, there will never be something by Gertrude Stein that I won't love. But I especially love...
..."but you have to really learn to express complication, go easy and if you can't go easy go as easy as you can."
and also much like Lady Gaga and Cher, the writing styles of Gertrude Stein aren't for everyone.
..."but you have to really learn to express complication, go easy and if you can't go easy go as easy as you can."
and also much like Lady Gaga and Cher, the writing styles of Gertrude Stein aren't for everyone.
March 16, 2010
One of my favorite books of all time. Just slide into this short novel and let the characters' jibing and jabbering take over.
June 25, 2014
Brewsie and Willie is more straightforward than some of Stein's work, but it's unlike the other World War texts of hers that I'm most familiar with. If you like Wars I Have Seen, then you'll find this shorter novel to be more enjoyable because it is structured as philosophical and casual conversations among the soldiers stationed abroad in World War II. The writing is more spirited and less verbose than WIHS because it mimics (mimesis) speech patterns of the time instead of recounting minute details about war.
October 18, 2014
Stein nails so much of human discourse and has incredible sentences that just resonate with truth. It's just hard to accept that a Jewish lesbian at this time would think that the mundane, everyday topics she focuses on are the most important things she could be addressing in her work. But that's Stein for you.
June 6, 2020
Odd and difficult to describe, but affecting--I'm glad I read it. The style is definitely modernist but engaging and readable.
January 26, 2022
Do you know, said Pauline with great solemnity, you know that Stein woman who says things. Yeah we all know, said Willie. Well she said America that is the United States of America is the oldest country in the world because she went into the twentieth century in eighteen ninety, when all the others were way behind and so now the United States of America instead of being young and vigorous is old like a man of fifty, still a chippy chaser cause he feels so young, but conservative, just like we are.
- pg. 50-51
- pg. 50-51
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November 24, 2020transcript of an esteemed modernist poet playing with her GI joes
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews