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American Literature
Library of America
 Paul Bowles

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Paul Bowles. Collected Stories and Later Writings
Collected Stories and Later Writings book jacket Edited by: Daniel Halpern
Library of America
ISBN: 1-931082-20-0
Series Number: 135
Product Code: 201428
Price: $40.00
Paul Bowles had already established himself as an important American composer when at the age of 38 he published The Sheltering Sky and became widely recognized as one of the most powerful writers of the postwar period. By the time of his death in 1999 he had become a unique and legendary figure in modern literary culture. From his base in Tangier he produced novels, stories, and travel writings in which exquisite surfaces and violent undercurrents mingle inextricably. Bowles—who once told an interviewer, "I've always wanted to get as far as possible from the place where I was born" —charts the collisions between "civilized" exiles and unfamiliar societies that they can never really grasp.

In fiction of slowly gathering menace, Bowles achieves effects of horror and dislocation with an elegantly spare style and understated wit. With a hallucinatory clarity as dry and unforgiving as the desert air, he sends his characters toward encounters with unknown and terrifying forces both outside them and within them. This Library of America volume, with its companion The Sheltering Sky, Let It Come Down, The Spider's House, is the first annotated edition of Bowles' work, offering the full range of his literary achievement: the portrait of an outsider who was one of the essential American writers of the last half century.

"All the tales are a variety of detective story," wrote Bowles of his first collection, The Delicate Prey and Other Stories (1950), "in which the reader is the detective; the mystery is the motivation for the characters' behavior." In such stories as "A Distant Episode" and "How Many Midnights," Bowles pushes human character beyond socially defined limits and maps a transformed (often horribly transformed) reality. A master of gothic terror and an acute and at times diabolically funny observer of manners and motives both American and Moroccan, Bowles confirmed his mastery of the short story in such volumes as A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard (1962), The Time of Friendship (1967), Things Gone and Things Still Here (1977), and Midnight Mass (1981), all included here along with a selection of his final stories.

This volume also contains Up Above the World (1966), a frightening novella set in Latin America in which a trusting American couple are lured into an annihilating trap, and the informed and fascinating travel book Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue (1963).


Paul Bowles. The Sheltering Sky, Let It Come Down, The Spiderýs House
The Sheltering Sky, Let It Come Down, The Spiderýs House book jacket Edited by: Daniel Halpern
Library of America
ISBN: 1-931082-19-7
Series Number: 134
Product Code: 201410
Price: $35.00
Paul Bowles had already established himself as an important American composer when, at the age of 38, he published The Sheltering Sky and became widely recognized as one of the most powerful writers of the postwar period. By the time of his death in 1999 he had become a unique and legendary figure in modern literary culture. From his base in Tangier he produced novels, stories, and travel writings in which exquisite surfaces and violent undercurrents mingle. Bowles—who once told an interviewer, "I've always wanted to get as far as possible from the place where I was born" —charts the collisions between "civilized" exiles and unfamiliar societies that they can never really grasp. In fiction of slowly gathering menace, he achieves effects of horror and dislocation with an elegantly spare style and understated wit. This Library of America volume, containing his first three novels, with its companion Collected Stories and Later Writings, is the first annotated edition of Bowles' work, offering the full range of his literary achievement: the portrait of an outsider who was one of the essential American writers of the last half century.

The Sheltering Sky (1949), which remains Bowles' most celebrated work, describes the unraveling of a young, sophisticated, and adventuresome married couple as they make their way into the Sahara. In a prose style of meticulous calm and stunning visual precision, Bowles tracks Port and Kit Moresby on a journey through the desert that culminates in death and madness.

In Let It Come Down (1952), 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' second novel is an alternately comic and horrific account of a descent into nihilism.

The Spider's House (1955), the longest and most complex of Bowles' novels, is set against the end of French rule in Morocco. Its characters—ranging from a Moroccan boy gifted with spiritual healing power to an American writer who regrets the passing of traditional ways—are caught up in the clash between colonial and nationalist factions, and are forced to confront cultural gulfs widened by political violence.





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