Paul Bowles Books In Order

Novels

  1. The Sheltering Sky (1949)
  2. Let It Come Down (1952)
  3. The Spider’s House (1955)
  4. Up Above the World (1966)

Collections

  1. The Delicate Prey (1950)
  2. A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard (1962)
  3. The Time of Friendship (1967)
  4. Pages from Cold Point (1968)
  5. Things Gone and Things Still Here (1977)
  6. Collected Stories (1978)
  7. Points in Time (1982)
  8. Unwelcome Words (1988)
  9. Too Far from Home (1993)
  10. The Review of Contemporary Fiction: 20 (2000)
  11. A Distant Episode (2006)
  12. The Stories of Paul Bowles (2006)
  13. Call at Corazon (2007)
  14. Everything is Nice (2012)

Non fiction

  1. Their Heads are Green (1963)
  2. Without Stopping (1972)
  3. Paul Bowles on Music (2003)
  4. Days (2006)
  5. Travels (2010)

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Paul Bowles Books Overview

The Sheltering Sky

When The Sheltering Sky was first published in 1949, it established Paul Bowles as one of the most singular and promising writers of the postwar generation. Its startlingly original vision has withstood the test of time and confirmed Tennessee Williams’s early estimation: ‘The Sheltering Sky alone of the books that I have…
read by American authors appears to bear the spiritual imprint of recent history in the western world.’ In this classic work of psychological terror, Bowles examines the ways in which Americans apprehend an alien culture and the ways in which their incomprehension destroys them. The story of three worldly young travelers Port Moresby, his wife, Kit, and their friend, Tunner adrift in the cities and deserts of North Africa after World War II, The Sheltering Sky is merciless in its evocation of the emotional dislocation induced by a foreign setting. As the Americans embark on an ill fated journey through desolate terrain, they are pushed to the limits of human reason and intelligence by the unfathomable emptiness and impassive cruelty of the desert. Along the way, they encounter a host of enigmatic characters whose inarticulate strangeness seals the travelers off even more completely from the culture in which they are traveling, causing their fierce attachments to one another to unravel. This special fiftieth anniversary commemorative edition of Bowles’s unforgettable first novel includes the original New York Times review by Tennessee Williams and a preface the author wrote for his first novel before he died in 1999.

Let It Come Down

Let It Come Down‘, with its title from Macbeth, tells the story of Dyar, a New York bank clerk who throws up his secure, humdrum job to find a reality abroad with which to identify himself, and his macabre experiences in the inferno of Tangiers as he gives 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’ second novel is an alternately comic and horrific account of a descent into nihilism.

The Spider’s House

Fez, 1954, and American ex pat Stenham reluctantly accepts a guide for his night time walk home through the streets of the Medina. A nationalist uprising is transforming the country, much to the annoyance of Stenham, who enjoys the trappings of the old city. His path soon crosses with the young, illiterate son of a healer, another outsider to the newly politicised life of Morocco, in this brutally honest novel of life in the midst of terrorism, violence and the ugly opportunism that accompanies both. Bowles’ most masterly novel combines his classic themes: the conflict of Eastern and Western cultures and the trials of otherness.

Up Above the World

On the terrace of an eloborate hilltop apartment overlooking a Central American capital, four people sit making polite conversation. The American couple an elderly physician and his young wife are tourists. Their host, whom they have just met, is a young man of striking good looks and charm. The girl, who is his mistress, is very young and very beautiful. Sitting there, with drinks in their hands, watching the sunset, the Slades seem to be experiencing the sort of fortunate chance encounter that travelers cherish. But amidst the civilities and small talk, one remark proves prophetic. The host says to the American woman: ‘It’s not exactly what you think.’ Masterfully with the poetic control that has always characterized his work Paul Bowles leads the reader beneath the surface of hospitality and luxury into a tortuous maze of human relationships and shifting moods, until what seems at first a merely casual encounter is seen to be one rooted in viciousness and horror.

The Delicate Prey

Exemplary storles that reveal the blzarre, the dlsturblng, the perllous, and the wlse ln other clvlllzatlons from one of Amerlca’s most lmportant wrlters of the twentleth century.

A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard

These are 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 over Lahcen is the classical story of the kif smoker’s ability to outwit the drinker. Driss the soldier, with aid of kif, proves the existence of magic to his enlightened superior officer. For all of them the kif pipe is the means to attaining a state of communication not only with others but above all with themselves.

Points in Time

In this intense and brilliant book Bowles focuses on Morocco, condensing expreience, emotion, and the whole history of a people into a series of short, insightful vignettes. He distills for us the very essence of Moroccan culture. With extraordinary immediacy, he takes the reader on a journey through the Moroccan centuries, pausing at points along the way to create resonant images of the country, it’s landscapes, and the beliefs and characteristics of its inhabitants.

Too Far from Home

For over forty five years, Paul Bowles has been one of this century’s most enigmatic and intriguing writers, best known for his novel The Sheltering Sky. This striking collection highlights Bowles’s undeniable virtuosity and brings together for the first time his finest work including a new unpublished novella, Too Far from Home, and previously unpublished letters.

A Distant Episode

A Distant Episode conatins the best of Paul Bowle’s short fiction, selected by the author. An American cult figure, Bowles has fascinated such disparate talents as Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, Truman Capote, William S. Burroughs, Gore Vidal, and Jay McInerney. His first novel, The Sheltering Sky, was a best seller in the 1950s and was made into a film by Bernardo Bertolucci in 1990.

The Stories of Paul Bowles

An American literary cult figure, Paul Bowles established his legacy with the novel The Sheltering Sky. An immediate sensation, it became a fixture in American letters. Bowles then returned his energies to the short story the genre he preferred and soon mastered.

Bowles’s short fiction is orchestral in composition and exacting in theme, marked by a unique, delicately spare style and a dark, rich, exotic mood, by turns chilling, ironic, and wry. In ‘Pastor Dowe at Tacat ,’ a Protestant missionary is sent to the far reaches of the globe a place, he discovers, where his God has no power. In ‘Call at Coraz n,’ an American husband abandons his alcoholic wife on their honeymoon in a South American jungle. In ‘Allal,’ a boy’s drug induced metamorphosis into a deadly serpent leads to his violent death, but not before he feels the ‘joy’ of sinking his fangs into human prey. Also gathered here are Bowles’s most famous works, such as ‘The Delicate Prey,’ a grimly satisfying tale of vengeance, and ‘A Distant Episode,’ which Tennessee Williams proclaimed ‘a masterpiece of short fiction.’

‘Beauty and terror go wonderfully well together in Bowles’s work,’ Madison Smartt Bell once said. Though sometimes shocking, Bowles’s stories have a symmetry that is haunting and ultimately moral. Like Poe whose stories Bowles’s mother read to him at bedtime, Bowles had an instinctive adeptness with the nightmare vision. Joyce Carol Oates, in her introduction to Too Far from Home, writes that his characters are ‘at the mercy of buried wishes experienced as external fate.’ In these masterful stories, our deepest fears are manifest, tables are turned, and allegiances are tested. Fate is an inexorable element of Bowles’s distant landscapes, and its psychological effects on his characters are rendered with penetrating accuracy. Like Hemingway, Bowles is famously unsentimental, a skilled craftsman of crystalline prose.

Their Heads are Green

‘Bowles, one of the four or five best writers in English in the second half of the twentieth century, embraced the desert as a Christian saint embraces his martyrdom. His self abnegation and his love of traditional culture made him one of the keenest observers of other civilizations we have ever had in America. Unlike his countrymen he did not brashly set out to improve the rest of the world. For Bowles, Americanization was the problem, not the solution. As these startling, sober travel pieces show, Bowles, because of his powers of negative capability, was able to enter into the inner truth of even the most remote places and peoples.’ from the Introduction by Edmund White

Without Stopping

Paul Bowles, the acclalmed author of The Shelterlng Sky, offers movlng, powerful, subtle, and fasclnatlng lnslghts lnto hls llfe, hls wrltlng, and hls world.

Paul Bowles on Music

‘It’s an easy enough job if one has something to say,’ Paul Bowles remarked in a letter to his mother about his first foray into music criticism. And Paul Bowles, indeed, had plenty to say about music. Though known chiefly as a writer of novels and stories, Paul Bowles 1910 99 thought of himself first and foremost as a composer. Drawing together the work he did at the intersection of his two passions and professions, writing and music, this volume collects the music criticism Bowles published between 1935 and 1946 as well as an interview conducted by Irene Herrmann shortly before his death. An intimate of Aaron Copland and prot g of Virgil Thomson, Bowles was a musical sophisticate acquainted with an enormous range of music. His criticism collected here brilliantly illuminates not only the whole range of modernist composition but also film music, jazz, Mexican and Moroccan music, and many other genres. As a reviewer he reports on established artists and young hopefuls, symphonic concerts indoors and out, and important premieres of works by Copland, Thomson, Cage, Shostakovich, and Stravinsky, among others. Written with the austere grace of his better known literary works, Bowles’s criticism enhances our picture of an important era in American music history as well as our sense of his accomplishments and extraordinary contribution to twentieth century culture.

Days

Between 1987 and 1989, Paul Bowles, at the suggestion of a friend, kept a journal to record the daily events of his life. What emerges is not only just a record of the meals, conversations, and health concerns of the author of The Sheltering Sky but also a fascinating look at an artist at work in a new medium. Characterized by a refreshing informality, clear sightedness, and passages of exquisite prose, these pages record with equal fascination the behavior of an itinerant spider, a brutal episode of violence in a Tangier marketplace, and the pageantry and excess of Malcolm Forbes’s seventieth birthday party. In Days, a master observer of the foreign and obscure turns his attentions toward his own daily existence, giving us a startlingly candid portrait of his life in late twentieth century Tangier.

Travels

Inmore than forty essays and articles that range from Paris to Ceylon, Thailand to Kenya, and, of course, Morocco, the great twen tieth century American writer encapsulates his long and full life, and sheds light on his brilliant fiction. Whether he’s recalling the cold water artists flats of Paris s Left Bank or the sun worshipping eccentrics of Tangier, Paul Bowles imbues every piece with a deep intelligence and the acute perspective of his rich experience of the world. Woven throughout are photographs from the renowned author s private archive, which place him, his wife, the writer Jane Bowles, and their many friends and compatriots in the landscapes his essays bring so vividly to life. With an introduction by Paul Theroux and a chronology by Daniel Halpern

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