Three Lives

American writer Gertrude Stein was definitely decades ahead of her time. Injecting experimental and avant-garde elements into her work, she described her method as "literary cubism" -- an understandable goal for someone who was close friends with Picasso and many other important artists of the day. Although the collection Three Lives definitely pushes the literary envelope, the stories still manage to convey tender and engaging human portraits of three very different female protagonists.