A rose is a rose is a rose... The phrase that made Gertrude Stein famous comes from her story "The World is Round." Gertrude Stein's children's book is just as much or just as little a children's book as "The Little Prince" by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. "The World is Round" was created around the same time as the novel "Ida," which Gertrude Stein began in the summer of 1937. And perhaps Ida is the adult rose. The extreme, experimental prose of her earlier literary works has given way to a simpler, yet no less consistent language at the time of the creation of this book, which is now being translated into German for the first time.