[Wgcp-whc] REMINDER: January 17, 4pm: Janet Malcolm Reading, Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice

[Nancy Kuhl]

Please join us at 4pm on Thursday, January 17th for a reading and 
discussion by scholar Janet Malcolm, about her new book Two Lives: Gertrude 
and Alice published this fall by Yale University Press. Malcolm researched 
this work in the Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers at the Beinecke 
Library. Janet Malcolm is the author of The Journalist and the Murderer, 
The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, and Reading Chekhov, among 
other books. She writes for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books 
and lives in New York City. The Beinecke Library is located at 12 Wall 
Street, New Haven. This event is free and open to the public.

Two Lives is a work of literary biography and investigative journalism 
exploring the lives of modernist writer Gertrude Stein and her partner 
Alice B. Toklas. The portrait of the legendary couple that emerges from 
this work is unexpectedly charged. As Malcolm pursues the truth of the 
couple’s charmed life in a village in Vichy France, her subject becomes the 
larger question of biographical truth. “The instability of human knowledge 
is one of our few certainties,” she writes. Two Lives is also a work of 
literary criticism. “Even the most hermetic of [Stein’s] writings are works 
of submerged autobiography,” Malcolm writes. “The key of ‘I’ will not 
unlock the door to their meaning—you need a crowbar for that—but will 
sometimes admit you to a kind of anteroom of suggestion.” Whether unpacking 
the accessible Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in which Stein “solves the 
koan of autobiography,” or wrestling with The Making of Americans, a 
masterwork of “magisterial disorder,” Malcolm is stunningly perceptive. Of 
Malcolm's work Margaret Talbot of The New York Times Book Review has 
written: "No other writer tells better stories about the perpetual, the 
unwinnable, battle between narrative and truth."

Nancy Kuhl
Associate Curator, Yale Collection of American Literature
The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Yale University
121 Wall Street, P.O. Box 208240
New Haven, CT 06520-8240
Phone: 203.432.2966

African American Studies at Beinecke Library: http://beineckejwj.wordpress.com/
Poetry at Beinecke Library: http://beineckepoetry.wordpress.com/
Room 26 Cabinet of Curiosities: http://brblroom26.wordpress.com/