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Fragmentation, dissection, explosion: how to characterize the most influentially innovative art—be it theatre, music, literature or painting—of the twentieth century’s first half depends on which artistic formation one has in view and how violent or deliberate one takes that formation to have been. Regardless, a splitting open, dismantling or weakening of the bonds between its constituent parts marked that moment’s culture, with Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso as two of that disintegrative impulse’s most influential proponents. Such history might well lead a reader to anticipate scintillating exchanges, crackling with imagination, throughout this collection.