Books like A Moveable Feast

For the same literary Paris from behind the bookstore counter

If what you loved was the feeling of moving through Hemingway’s circle of writers and artists, Shakespeare and Company brings you back into almost exactly the same world. Sylvia Beach tells the story of the legendary bookshop where Hemingway borrowed books and where James Joyce’s Ulysses was published. Her version of Paris is warmer and less competitive than Hemingway’s, and you get to see many of the same people from the perspective of the woman who welcomed them through the door.

For the novel that came out of Hemingway’s Paris years

If you liked the cafés, drinking, travel, friendships, and conversations where nobody quite says what they mean, this is the obvious next Hemingway. The Sun Also Rises turns the expatriate world Hemingway remembers in A Moveable Feast into fiction and follows a damaged group of friends from Paris to Spain. It is much sadder and less affectionate, with the war and disappointment sitting just underneath all the parties.

For another young writer running away to 1920s Paris

Glassco arrives in Paris young, broke, ambitious, and convinced that becoming a writer is reason enough to rearrange his whole life. His Montparnasse is full of cheap rooms, drinking, sex, literary acquaintances, bad decisions, and the thrill of being far from home. It has much of the same youthful freedom as A Moveable Feast, but Glassco is messier, funnier, and far less interested in Hemingway’s ideas about discipline and craft.

For the same Paris writers and artists from inside Gertrude Stein’s salon

If Hemingway’s encounters with Gertrude Stein, Picasso, and the other people around 1920s Paris made you want more, this gives you the same social world from another side. Stein writes through the voice of her partner, Alice B. Toklas, and turns their home, friendships, visitors, and arguments into the center of the story. It is more playful and eccentric than Hemingway, and much more interested in painters, personalities, and the social machinery behind modernism.

For being broke in Paris without the romance

If you liked the moments when Hemingway counts his money, stretches out a meal, or tries to work while funds are running low, Orwell takes that experience somewhere much harsher. He writes about hunger, cheap lodging, restaurant kitchens, exhausting work, and the daily mechanics of surviving without money. It shares A Moveable Feast’s close attention to ordinary life, but almost none of its nostalgia.

For the bigger story behind Hemingway’s Lost Generation

If A Moveable Feast made you curious about everyone just outside Hemingway’s frame, this is a great next book. Vaill follows Gerald and Sara Murphy, a wealthy American couple whose circle included Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Picasso, and many of the people associated with 1920s Paris and the Riviera. Because it is a researched biography rather than a memoir, you get the wider social story Hemingway leaves out — and sometimes a very different version of the people he describes.

For Hemingway and Hadley’s marriage from her side

If the relationship between Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley, was the part of A Moveable Feast that stayed with you, this novel imagines those same years from her point of view. You return to the apartments, trips, literary friendships, ambition, and eventual betrayal, but the emotional center shifts away from Hemingway. It is historical fiction rather than firsthand testimony, and much more openly romantic and dramatic than his memoir. It is the obvious choice if the tenderness and regret around Hadley were what stayed with you.

For expatriate Paris after the money ran out

A decade later, Henry Miller was still doing something Hemingway would recognize: trying to become a writer in Paris while living on almost nothing. But Miller’s version of the city is dirtier, hungrier, more sexual, and much more chaotic. There are borrowed meals, shabby rooms, friends, arguments, women, and endless wandering through Paris, all delivered in a wild, overflowing, manic style that is nearly the opposite of Hemingway’s control and restraint. Read it for the same dream of the writer in Paris after the romance has started to rot.