An indispensable companion to Gertrude Stein's masterpiece, The Making of Americans.

One of the great works of 20th-century American fiction, Stein's novel represents a peak of modernist literature: filled with repetition, overlapping and disintegrating plots, innumerable characters, and sentences stretching over pages. It is an immensely rewarding book, but also a potentially frustrating one.

At last, Cecilia Konchar Farr and Janie Sisson offer a reader's guide-the first of its kind. As I Was Saying is proof that The Making of Americans is not unreadable as charged, and offers accessible entry to the experimental writing Stein valued and promoted most-the original modernist novel by the era's most influential author.