Phillipe Mora:
A brilliant, disturbing, even shocking historical saga about modernist icon Gertrude Stein.
Angela Kershaw:
Her study is a valuable and well-informed portrait of a troubled and troubling literary and political relationship.
Miriam Intrator:
Will's most significant contribution is to challenge the assumption that an individual with a liberal personal lifestyle and/or creative interests will inherently be someone with liberal political views.
Christopher Benfey:
[An] absorbingly detailed and even-handed book.
Fascinating.
Gerald Sorin:
She has given us a fuller, more realistic picture of a multilayered Stein who was fairly talented, but who also, in Will's own words, was in morally significant ways a 'despicable individual.'
Eitan Kensky:
Extremely detailed and erudite.
Unlikely Collaboration is a fascinating book that explores a sensitive topic with solid documentation.
Exceptionally well researched and elegantly written, this book is certain to make an important contribution to and beyond Stein studies.... Highly recommended.
Michal Kimmelman:
A fine-grained, unflinching, and nuanced history.
Jerome Boyd Maunsell:
A tenacious work of literary detection and analysis
T.L. Ponick:
[Unlikely Collaboration] reveals a considerably more complex, and perhaps devious, Gertrude Stein than currently accepted legend would dictate.
Eric Banks:
...revisited the relationship of Stein and Faÿ, offering the fullest account to date of their professional and personal ties.
Robert Fulford:
A revealing and absorbing work of scholarship.
Phyllis Gaffney:
Barbara Will's story is well told...
Brilliant and fascinating.... This exceptional study provides new insights into previously hidden corners of Stein's life.
Robert O. Paxton, author of Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944:
An unlikely collaboration indeed. One was perhaps America's most celebrated avant-garde writer, living in France; the other a French biographer of Benjamin Franklin turned anti-Masonic zealot and collaborator with the Nazis from 1940 to 1944. Gertrude Stein wanted to persuade Americans that the Vichy collaborationist leader Philippe Pétain was a French George Washington; Bernard Faÿ helped save Stein's art collection, and maybe Stein herself, from the Nazis. Barbara Will brings alive their association and ponders the compatibility of literary modernism with political reaction.
Richard J. Golsan, author of French Writers and the Politics of Complicity: Crises of Democracy in the 1940s and 1990s:
Barbara Will's Unlikely Collaboration is a beautifully written and engaging work that illuminates the lives and works of Gertrude Stein and Bernard Faÿ, their friendship, and the fascinating and troubled times in which that friendship formed and flourished. Will's book, penetrating in its psychological, literary, and historical insights, will appeal especially to readers interested in literary modernism and its often disturbing political connections.
