Acclaimed author Noël Riley Fitch, abetted by noted artist Rick Tulka, serves the dish on Select, the famous Montparnasse café that for nearly nine decades has been so vital to Paris and its intellectual denizens: from Hemingway, Beauvoir, Picasso, James Baldwin, and George Plimpton to the writers and artists who continue to work quietly there in the back room or heatedly debate every topic imaginable into the night. The artists have their work on the walls; the novelists include the café setting in their fiction. The quiet and drama of the Sélect world illustrates the centrality of cafés — particularly this one — to Parisian social, cultural, and intellectual life. Blending pithy profiles and witty drawings of clientele and staff, the book is organized around a history of the café, its daily and seasonal rhythms, particular colorful patrons, and even its typical café/brasserie food (including a few recipes). "A tribute so pleasant and persuasive that swarming tourists may make it difficult for Fitch and Tulka to find a table." -- Kirkus In this droll, delicious little volume,Fitch and Tulka provide an affectionate portrait of the Select Cafe, one of those famous Paris eateries that have served as candles to intellectual moths--French, American, and otherwise--for nearly a century. As Fitch reels off anecdotes about those who spent time writing, chatting, caffeinating, and dreaming in the Montparnasse spot, the book reads like a Who's Who of twentieth-century arts circles with cameo appearances by Hemingway, Bunuel, Brassaï, Giacometti, Beckett, Picasso, Noguchi, de Beauvoir, Satie, Poulenc, Baldwin, and Godard. The text, by the author of several books on American expatriates in Paris, is slender and sketchy, but that leaves more room for Tulka's marvelous line drawings, which capture the essences not only of the café's celebrity patrons but also its proprietors and waiters, along with numerous guests whose names are not known, but who are blithely immortalized. -- Booklist Noël Riley Fitch is a biographer and historian of expatriate intellectuals in Paris in the first half of the 20th century. She is the author of several books on Paris as well as the author of the biographies of Sylvia Beach, Anaïs Nin, and Julia Child. Used Book in Good Condition