This book is exciting on the conceptual level and awesome in its capacity to articulate what Stein is doing and why. This I think is the first book anyone should read if the person wants to appreciate Stein more fully. When God seemed to have died, a different concept of life was born for many writers. Critics and philosphers have formulated this change largely in terms of vitalist models stressing efforts at attuning to natural processes and modes of relation. Sarah Posman’s brilliant Vital Stein offers superb summaries of that work; then shows how Stein complicates that vitalism by stressing how constructive powers of mind can have their own deep engagement in the forces that constitute life. -- Charles F. Altieri, University of California, Berkeley

Sarah Posman works as an English teacher in Ghent, Belgium. In 2010 she obtained her PhD on Gertrude Stein from Ghent University. She was affiliated with Ghent University as a postdoctoral researcher until 2017. Her research on avant-garde poetry was funded by the Research Foundation Flanders. She has coedited The Intellectual Response to the First World War (Sussex Academic Press, 2017), Gertrude Stein in Europe: Reconfigurations Across Media, Disciplines and Traditions (Bloomsbury, 2015) and The Aesthetics of Matter: Modernism, the Avant-Garde and Material Exchange (De Gruyter, 2013). She is a member of the Gertrude Stein European Network and is working on Dutch translations of Stein’s lectures and poetry.