Writer’s Desk: Working in Cafes

When the writing den or (for those lucky ones) the separate writing office don’t offer much hope and the walls start closing in, there is always the cafe. The clink and clatter of dishware, the hiss of the espresso maker, the low burble of conversation; for certain kinds of writers this outside interference focuses the imagination more than it distracts.

Per Benjamin Wurgaft in theLos Angeles Review of Books:

Hemingway once reported that in cafés he “was like a charging rhino when he wrote,”...