Kit and Port Moresby are an American couple touring North Africa with another man, Turner. As they travel deeper into the Sahara desert, tensions rise and a love triangle emerges: the landscape informs the emotional lives of the characters, who are by turns suffocated by their surroundings and moved by its beauty. Writing in The New York Times, Tennessee Williams called The Sheltering Sky “enthralling . . . powerful, bringing to mind one of those clouds that you have seen in summer, close ...

“Bowles’s tales are at once austere, witty, violent, and sensuous. They move with the inevitability of myth. His language has a purity of line, a poise and authority entirley its own.” —Tobias WolffAn American cult figure, Paul Bowles has fascinated such disparate talents as Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, Truman Capote, William S. Burroughs, Gore Vidal, and Tobias Wolff. From “The Delicate Prey” to “Too Far from Home,” this definitive collection celebrates the Bowles’s masterful ar...

In the nineteenth century there flourished a peculiar breed of Englishmen—often the second sons of the aristocracy, or ambitious men from a lower class—who as soldiers, consuls and tea planters, were largely responsible for making England a great colonial power.Save for the fact that he is a staunch anticolonialist, Paul Bowles resembles these men in many respects. Like them, he appears to be happiest away from civilization as we know it; like them, he thrives when the traveling is ...

First published in 1962, A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard by American author Paul Bowles is a book comprising four tales of contemporary life in a land where cannabis, rather than alcohol, customarily provides a way out of the phenomenological world. Thus, of the men in these stories, Salam uses suggestions supplied by smoking kif to rid himself of a possible enemy. He of the Assembly catches himself up in the mesh of his own kif-dream and begins to act it out in reality. Idir's victory o...

Driven by famine from their home in the Rif, Mohamed's family walks to Tangier in search of a better life. But things are no better there. Eight of Mohamed's siblings die of malnutrition and neglect, and one is killed by his father in a fit of rage. On moving to another province Mohamed learns how to charm and steal, and discovers the joys of drugs, sex and alcohol. Proud, insolent and afraid of no one, he returns to Tangier, where he is caught up in the violence of the 1952 independence r...

Originally published in 1955, Paul Bowles’s remarkable novel set in Fez, Morocco, during the last days of the French colonial empire, is an expansive piece of writing—vintage Bowles"With its atmosphere of sinister tension, its scenes of nationalist conspiracy and French police action, of escape and pursuit in the Arab quarter, The Spider's House reads for stretches like a first-class political thriller." -New York TimesThe...

"Charhadi has written the first novel ever produced in Moghrebi. The work is not only unprecedented, it is also very good, and much of it is marvellous." —Alfred Chester, Book WeekOne of the most unusual literary innovations ever produced, A Life Full of Holes is the result of a singular collaboration between two remarkable individuals: Driss ben Hamed Charhadi, an illiterate North African servant and street vendor, and legendary...

“The Sheltering Sky is one of the most original, even visionary, works of fiction to appear in the twentieth century.” —Tobias Wolff"It stands head and shoulders above most other novels published in English since World War II.” —New RepublicIn this existential classic of psychological terror, Paul Bowles examines the ways in which Americans apprehend other cultures—and the ways in which their incomprehension destroys them....

In Let It Come Down, Paul Bowles plots the doomed trajectory of Nelson Dyar, a New York bank teller who comes to Tangier in search of a different life and ends up giving in to his darkest impulses. Rich in descriptions of the corruption and decadence of the International Zone in the last days before Moroccan independence, Bowles's second novel is an alternately comic and horrific account of a descent into nihilism.

Paul Bowles’s classic collection of short stories, now available in a a deluxe paperback edition—part of Ecco’s Art of the Story series“All the tales are a variety of detective story,” wrote Bowles of this, his first short story collection, “in which the reader is the detective; the mystery is in the motivation for the charcters’ behavior.” In such stories as “A Distant Episode” and How Many Midnights,” Bowles pushes human character beyond socially defined limits and maps a transfo...

“Bowles is at his best when writing about places. He can evoke a place with a few sure strokes.”—New York Times“His work is art. At his best, Bowles has no peer.”—TimeTravels is a thrilling anthology of the travel writings of Paul Bowles, author of the era-defining post-war novel The Sheltering Sky. The acclaimed essays in Travel—never before collected in a single volume—span more than sixty years and range from Bowles’s early days in Paris to his time spent...

Northern British Columbia has always played an important role in Canada’s economy, but for many Canadians it also existed as an almost forgotten place: a vast territory where only a few roads, some railroad tracks, and a ferry system connected small cities, towns, and villages to the outside world. Now, as the global appetite for oil, gas, hydroelectricity, wood, and minerals intensifies, this resource-rich and geographically important region is being pulled onto the national and internati...