Modernism

Reviews

The Life That Refuses to End: Francesca Wade Wins the Plutarch Award for Her Stein Biography

Francesca Wade's Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife has won the 2026 Plutarch Award, the only prize for biography judged exclusively by biographers. A moment to consider what biography does — and what it cannot.

Literature

What Gertrude Stein Still Has to Teach Us, via Deborah Levy

Deborah Levy's My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein is memoir, criticism, and something that resists both labels. It tracks a year in Paris alongside a writer who was central to modernism and systematically underread. Levy pays close attention — which, in the end, is the point.

Reviews

A Biography That Reinvents Biography: Francesca Wade Wins the Plutarch Award

Francesca Wade has won the 2026 Plutarch Award for Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, described by a jury of biographers as groundbreaking. A book that doesn't just tell a life — it questions what telling a life can mean.

Reviews

Ern Malley Never Existed. His Poems Did. Does That Matter?

In 1944, two Australian poets invented a dead poet named Ern Malley to prove that modernism was a fraud. The scandal arrived on schedule. But the poems turned out to be too good to be just a joke.

Authors

The Woolf We Never Knew: Stories That Were Waiting for Us

Unpublished short stories by Virginia Woolf have surfaced, revealing a more playful, romantic side of the writer we thought we knew. An invitation to rediscover her.