An edge city, poised at the northernmost tip of Africa, just nine miles
across the Strait of Gibraltar from Europe and overlooking both the
Mediterranean and the Atlantic, Tangier is more than a destination, it
is an escape. The Interzone, as William Burroughs called it, has
attracted spies, outlaws, outcasts, and writers for centuries--men and
women working out at the edge of literary forms, breaking through
artistic borders.
This outlaw originality is what most astonishes when encountering the
literary history of Tangier for the first time. Particularly in the past
century, the results were some of the most incendiary and influential
books of our time, the most prominent being Burroughs' Naked Lunch and
Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky. The list of "edge" writers who were
drawn to Tangier is long, among them Ibn Battuta, Samuel Pepys,
Alexandre Dumas, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Walter Harris, Jean Genet,
Paul and Jane Bowles, Tennessee Williams, William Burroughs, Brion
Gysin, Patricia Highsmith, Jack Kerouac, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal,
Allen Ginsberg, Alfred Chester, Joe Orton, and Mohamed Choukri.
This is a book that captures the unconventional, multilayered story of
literary Tangier and is a must-have for travelers, armchair adventurers,
and literature buffs, particularly aficionados of the Beat generation
writers and the poets who made the city their home.