Ida

A witty, provocative, prescient novel about a woman who is famous for being famous, from the visionary author of Tender Buttons and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas   “Odd, sad and happy events populate the novel’s pages, while doppelgängers lurk everywhere: Ida becomes Winnie, because she’s winning; characters like parents to Ida come and go, and men who may, or do, become her husbands appear, disappear, reappear. . . . Release from textual and narrative tension comes, in part, through [Gertrude] Stein’s remarkable voice. . . . I enjoy Stein most as a theorist: her ideas startle me, in whatever form they appear.”—Lynne Tillman, The New York Times Book Review   “The strangest book I read was Ida, by Gertrude Stein, which my mom gave to me without much fanfare. This must have been when I was in high school. It’s an odd book, with a telescoping narrator and that new-brain prose of Stein’s. My first encounter with very simple sentences looted of sense. I loved it.”—Ben Marcus