"The Library of America has made it easier for readers to enjoy Bowles's
exotic literary harvest." -- The Columbus Dispatch
Paul Bowles was a composer, writer, and an American expatriate who spent
most of the last five decades of his life in Tangier. According The
Boston Globe, he was "one of the literary class acts of the twentieth
century." This Library of America volume, containing his stories and
travel writings, is one of two volumes in the first annotated edition of
Paul Bowles's work and is a "treasure trove for readers who haven't
explored beyond The Sheltering Sky" (The Seattle Times).
"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).
LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization
founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by
publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most
significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than
300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in
length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are
printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
