***** *Modernism was a literary movement at the start of the twentieth century that wanted to ‘make it new’.** Dispensing with traditional form and structure, some of the most challenging works of English literature emerged from this era, and its authors Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and Ezra Pound. Gertrude Stein was herself a modernist writer and playwright who spearheaded the movement, developing her ‘continuous present’ style of narration. Among her many dense works is How to Write, a work that still challenges and provokes today’s readers. In the book, Stein uses the English language in ways that seem unorthodox. Her syntax and grammatical control is loose, and there is no real message in what ‘proper writing’ should be. It remains a sort of text for her way of writing, with a repetitious style that delights in the abstract nature of words and of language. A typical paragraph reads as ‘When they like help they like help. They have it. They like it for them. They have it. They make the most of it which is why they wish. They will wish to have it. Made for them what they have in the way of advising and they need hope. They will allow themselves all for it. They might without which wish. In a way. They must like whatever they do.’ The book is split into eight sections, including ‘sentences’, ‘forensics’ and ‘a grammarian’, but the 120,000 words blend into one absorbing whole. **Gertrude Stein** (1874-1946) was an American-born writer who moved to Paris, becoming part of the ‘Lost Generation’ which brought Hemingway and Fitzgerald to her salon. Her best-known works include her memoir, The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, as well as books like Tender Buttons, an example of her ‘hermetic’ works.