A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

 

There have been several posthumous books by Ernest Hemingway released, such as Islands in The Stream, or True At First Light, edited down from abandoned writing left after his death. Some scholars have argued that this diminishes his reputation, making him the Tupac Shakur of literature, but it does seem like there is a case for reissuing A Moveable Feast. The original edition was first published in 1964, and was full of odd editorial decisions, such as taking out references to the reader in the second person, or changing a passage about F Scott Fitzgerald to a harsher one from an earlier draft. Chapters were shifted around, and an ending was tacked on too – it can seem like the text of A Moveable Feast was itself something of a movable feast. For those who are unfamiliar with the book, it is a series of sketches about Paris just after World War Two, featuring name-dropping of the first order, as the then-aspiring writer Hemingway visits Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and most compellingly, F Scott Fitzgerald. Anyone who has read the original won’t need to read this urgently, but for first time readers, this is the preferable edition to buy. [Keir Hind]