Toklas or Hemingway's maudlin A Moveable Feast. Both of these memoirs are infinitely more entertaining than Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. (Djuna Barnes' lover Thelma Wood is renamed Emily Pine - you get the idea.) But if you are less detective minded than me, I guess this new edition will do just fine.įor further reading, I warmly recommend Being Geniuses Together by the very outspoken Robert McAlmon, with later material interpolated by Kay Boyle, yet another unreliable narrator. This contains a good introduction and reveals the real identity of many thinly veiled characters in an appendix. Also, if you really want to know who's who, you are better off with the 1995 OUP edition with notes by Michael Gnarowski. However, you should bear in mind that around 25 per cent of it is fiction. (I'll give you a clue: it's later than you think.) So I would like to exhort everyone and anyone with an appetite for stories about the good old days in Paris, when James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein roamed freely, to pick up this book and enjoy themselves. From what I gather, this edition includes an introduction that comments on the fictitiousness of some events described in the book and its real date of composition.

It's good to see that John Glassco's hilarious if not always reliable memoir of his youthful exploits in Paris is back in print.

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