1 h 40 minAudiobook8 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at costPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What if a glass, a hat, or a piece of meat could change the way you hear words?
In Tender Buttons, Gertrude Stein turns the household into a place of verbal surprise. These short prose poems explore ordinary things without describing them in ordinary ways. Sound, rhythm, and unexpected pairings of words take the place of familiar explanations, inviting you to listen rather than follow a plot.
The book moves through three sections: Objects, Food, and Rooms. Separate titled entries give way to one long stretch of prose. Stein’s experiments share an impulse with the painters around her in Paris, including Pablo Picasso: to break apart familiar ways of showing the world and discover what else words can do.
What you’ll discover
- Objects seen sideways Meet glasses, hats, and household things through language that refuses the usual descriptive path.
- Food on the tongue Explore roastbeef, celery, asparagus, and breakfast as subjects for strange, sound-filled prose poems.
- A room in prose Enter Rooms, where separate entries give way to one sustained exploration of space.
- Words in unexpected company Hear how repetition, small shifts, and unlikely pairings make familiar words feel strange.
- Permission to listen differently Let sound and rhythm guide your attention without asking for a steady storyline.
Who will love it
For curious readers who love poetry, modern art and language games, and anyone who wants to hear words as sound. Everyday objects become invitations to enjoy rhythm, wordplay and a fresh way of hearing English.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- A Paris household becomes a laboratory
- Objects: looking at things sideways
- Food: appetite and the pleasure of the mouth
- Rooms: one long look at space
- Sound, repetition and the freed word
- Reception, difficulty and what the book left behind
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- 15-minute summary
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- Hardcover
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Read and hear Botones tiernos in 25 languages and switch at any time. Or read two side by side, paragraph by paragraph: the way to learn a language with a book you love.
Botones tiernos
by Gertrude Stein · 1914
A glass, a hat and a room become experiments as Gertrude Stein reshapes words to make ordinary things felt anew.
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In short
Tender Buttons is a small book of strange, short prose poems by Gertrude Stein, an American writer living in Paris. It came out in 1914 in New York.
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
A Paris household becomes a laboratory
Gertrude Stein was born in the United States and settled in Paris in the early years of the twentieth century. She lived with Alice B. Toklas, and their home was a meeting place for artists and writers. On the walls hung paintings by young painters, including Picasso, long before such work was widely accepted. Stein sat among these pictures and thought about what they were doing.
The painters of that circle were breaking objects into planes and angles. A guitar or a face was no longer shown from a single point of view. Stein felt that writing had not yet made the same move. Most prose still told a reader what a thing looked like, step by step, in familiar order. She wanted to try something different.
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What is Tender Buttons about?
It is a set of short prose poems about everyday things, grouped in three sections called Objects, Food and Rooms. Instead of describing items plainly, Stein plays with the sound and arrangement of words to make readers see them freshly.
What does the title Tender Buttons mean?
Stein never explains it. Readers hear in it something small and soft, and a link between tenderness and fastening. Most critics accept that the title, like the book, works through suggestion and sound rather than a fixed meaning.
When was Tender Buttons written and published?
It was published in New York in 1914. Stein wrote it while living in Paris, in the circle of painters such as Picasso, whose experiments with shape and viewpoint she wanted to match in language.
The author
Gertrude Stein
1874–1946 · American modernist writer
Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) was an American author born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. She grew up in Oakland, California, and moved to Paris in 1903. She wrote fiction, poetry, plays, and essays. Her books include Three Lives (1909), Tender Buttons (1914), and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). She died in France.
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