This volume serves as an anthology to Stein's creative work: portraits of people - Matisse, Lipschitz, Picasso & Henry James - portraits of objects(Tender Buttons), her poetry, her novel Ida and her last work, Brewsie and Willie. These are set alongside the texts of many of her lectures, which reveal her precise and original philosophy of composition drawing on, among other things,William James's aesthetic theories and Bergson's concept of time.