Up in the Old Hotel and Other Stories Book

One of those rare treasures that just gets better with age. A one-man lesson in the cleanest yet most lyrical non-fiction you're likely to find anywhere. Whenever I need to clear my head and cleanse my soul, I pull out this book and reread any one of dozens of favorite passages. A kind of poetry of the streets -- Whitman would've loved Mitchell, I'm convinced of it!
I'd match "Joe Gould's Secret" with any famous novella in American Literature.
So many favorite lines ...
"Done by aproned, middle-aged people ponderous with beefsteak and beer, the waltz is an appalling spectacle." All You Can Hold for Five Bucks

"He had a habit of remarking to bartenders that he didn't see any sense in mixing whiskey with water since the whiskey was already wet." Mr Flood's Party

"The sturgeon rose twice, and cleared the water both times, and I plainly saw its bristly snout and its shiny little eyes and its white belly and its glistening, greenish-yellow, bony-plated, crocodilian back and sides, and it was a spooky sight."
The Rivermen

Mitchell often said that Joyce's Finnegan's Wake was one of his favorite books, one he read over and over. At first, this would seem an unlikely choice, but once you immerse yourself in his prose, you begin to hear some of the same cadences and gallow's humor in Mitchell's words.
I can't recommend this book highly enough.