One of my favorite books of all and ever is A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway.
The book is a collection of stories from his time in Paris in the 1920s published posthumously in 1964. He did not have a final say in how it was assembled and what was included and what wasn't. The first edition left out some real gems. I have both an old copy I found in an abandoned apartment in 2009 as well as a more recently acquired "restored edition" with several extra chapters and other changes. Of note is the addition of, "Birth of a New School," which is one of the most inspired pieces of writing I've ever enjoyed.
It's a damn delight, not least for his mastery of the lesser-utilized second-person perspective and how he transitions to first person. Also, the dialogue is pretty amusing. Here is a long passage, and I promise the full-piece is even better:
Birth of a New School
The blue-backed notebooks, the two pencils and the pencil sharpener. A pocket knife was too wasteful. The marble top tables. The smell of café crème. The smell of early morning sweeping out and mopping and luck were all you needed.
For luck you carried a horse chestnut and a rabbit’s foot in your right pocket.
The fur had been worn off the rabbits foot long ago and the bones and the sinews were polished by wear. The claws scratched at the lining of your pocket, and you knew your luck was still there.
Some days it went so well that you could make the country so that you could walk into it through the timber to come out into the clearing and onto the high ground and see the hills beyond the arm of the lake.
A pencil lead might break off in the conical nose of the pencil sharpener, and you would use the small blade of the pen knife to clear it. Or else sharpen the pencil carefully with the sharp blade and then slip your arm through the sweat-salted leather of your pack strap to lift the pack again. Get the other arm through and feel the weight settle on your back. And feel the pine needles under your moccasins as you started down for the lake.
Then you would hear someone say, “Hi Hem! What are you trying to do? Write in a café?"
Your luck had run out and you shut the notebook.
This was the worst thing that could happen.
If you could keep your temper, it would be better, but I was not good at keeping mine then and said, "You rotten son of a bitch. What are you doing here off your filthy beat?"
"Don’t be insulting just because you want to act like an eccentric."
"Take your dirty camping mouth out of here."
"It’s a public café. I’ve just as much right here as you have."
"Why don’t you go up to the Petite Chaumière where you belong?"
"Oh dear, don’t be so tiresome."
Now, you could get out and hope it was an accidental visit and that the visitor had only come in by chance and there was not going to be an infestation.
There were other good cafés to work in, but they were long walk away, and this was your home café. It was bad to be driven out of La Closerie des Lilas. You had to make a stand or move.
More fantastic lines from the original edition:
"I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what I was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day."
"...I had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood."
"Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about."
"It was in that room too that I learned not to think about anything that I was writing from the time I stopped writing until I started again the next day. That way my subconscious would be working on it and at the same time I would be listening to other people and noticing everything, I hoped; learning, I hoped; and I would read so that I would not think about my work and make myself impotent to it."
"Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would glow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was though a young person had died for no reason."
"When I stopped working on the races I was glad but it left an emptiness. By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better."
"I learned one thing" "What" "Never go on trips with someone you don't love."