Ledecky! June 23, 2022

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The Book Page

Back to Stein.

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But it has taken decades for an appreciation of Stein’s crime fiction to really take hold. Her work was indelibly literary in nature, her reach obvious from the beginning because she could name a thing with precision and wit. The famous epigraph, “You are all a lost generation,” from Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926), his debut novel, put a name to the feeling of those men —like Hemingway—who had returned from the Great War disillusioned and broken. Stein could sense the currents of new movements in art and literature. Indeed, she believed that detective fiction—in the American tradition of Dashiell Hammett, and perhaps some English approximations of the genre—could lay the groundwork for a new type of fiction. Stein was a modernist in that very modernist way of not being easy to read, or to understand, whose works fractured narrative expectation from word one.