"The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas ... is not an autobiography by Alice Toklas, Stein's companion from 1907 to her death, but a funny, innovative memoir which pays unusual attention to the 'wives of geniuses' as well as the 'geniuses' themselves. It focuses on the Paris years, mythologizing the Stein-Toklas household and presenting Stein as the writing member of an international art movement that starred Picasso. A lot of what we remember about Paris in the 1920s comes from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas*. Along the way Stein tells some stories about her past which are, according to her biographer James Mellow, streamlined versions of the truth."
-Phyllis Rose in The Norton Book of Women's Lives
If you, like me, absolutely adored Archivist Wasp and Latchkey, and were always niggled by the tantalizing fragments of a world almost like our own, where the ghost may have come from and how it all fell apart... here it is, and itβs glorious. What Kornher-Stace has done here, writing a post-apocalypse backwards to its origin, is like nothing Iβve read anywhere else.
I adore a good folktale. And that's what you're in for with this: a wonderful, unusual folktale with a dash of time travel and a smidgen of the superhuman. If folktales aren't your bag, you might not like this. But if they are, you're in for a sumptuously long one.
