"How had the pair of elderly Jewish lesbians survived the Nazis?" Janet Malcolm asks at the beginning of this extraordinary work of literary biography, criticism, and investigative journalism. The pair, of course, is modernist master Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, the 'worker bee' who ministered to Stein's needs throughout their forty-year expatriate 'marriage'. As Malcolm pursues the mystery of the couple's charmed life in Vichy France, her subject becomes the larger question of biographical truth.

-Winner of the 2008 PEN/ Jacqueline Bogard Weld Award for Biography
-Winner of the Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction (Publishing Triangle)
-A National Book Critics Circle Good Read

'Brilliant, penetrating and playful.' - New York Times Book Review
'Shrewd, humane, and beautifully written.' - John Gross, Wall Street Journal
'A remarkable work.' - Michael Kimmelman, New York Review of Books