The Sheltering Sky

The Sheltering Sky
Average customer rating:

The Enveloping Indifference

Depressingly Blissful

Tea in the Sahara

Westerners in Africa

Way overrated!

The Sheltering Sky
Paul Bowles
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
Literary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
Bowles, Paul | ( B ) | Authors, A-Z | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 0880015829

Amazon.com

American novelist and short-story writer, poet, translator, classical music composer, and filmscorer Paul Bowles has lived as an expatriate for more than 40 years in the North African nation of Morocco, a country that reaches into the vast and inhospitable Sahara Desert. The desert is itself a character in The Sheltering Sky, the most famous of Bowles' books, which is about three young Americans of the postwar generation who go on a walkabout into Northern Africa's own arid heart of darkness. In the process, the veneer of their lives is peeled back under the author's psychological inquiry.

Book Description

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.

Customer Reviews:

The Enveloping Indifference.......2006-08-15

A part of me hates to pass judgment upon a book I don't like or which doesn't interest me, because it reflects my own tastes and nothing else. And yet I write Amazon reviews to warn other people who might be like me and want to give new things (books, music, etc.) a try and I just want to give them my opinion on the item as a former newcomer to it.

I am a Burroughs fan and Burroughs moved to Tangier, North Africa mostly because of Paul Bowles and his novels (all of which, I understand, are set in Tangier.) Burroughs had nothing but praise for Paul Bowles' novels. Intrigued after all these years of hearing the praise, I decided to finally give Bowles a try.

I think that I may have likely made the wrong decision in buying & reading THE SHELTERING SKY first... His later novels, especially THE SPIDER'S HOUSE, have gotten more praise & acclaim (even from Burroughs) than this one. But still, I read a synopsis of the novel and it looked appealing: a writer in a strange land having estranged, strained relations with his wife. I felt right away that I could relate to such a situation and that it would be a good novel to read; as a young man in high school I felt like a stranger in a strange land and I had a serious, steady girlfriend of more than 4 years, and my meteoric rise as a young, compulsive writer of "autobiographical fiction" coincided with the disintegration of my relationship to this girl.

But, alas, reading this book I felt no such empathy with any of the characters. Really, I am just not worldly, and this might be the reason. But in any case I simply could not relate to these expatriates of the '40s.

But the main problem I have with the book has to be the writing itself; Burroughs has suggested that the aim of a writer is to "evoke clear images with his writing." An obvious conclusion -- in my opinion THE DEFINITIVE GOAL OF WRITING -- but which I think Paul Bowles fails at in this novel; I had a hard time 'seeing' the action of the first 50 pages, which is as far as I got into it before I had to set it down for good in disinterest. Truth is the novel didn't really interest me from the start; the first page has some nice sentences, but other than those the book failed to capture my interest.

Again, it may be my own fault as a reader for not getting into this book -- I'm not an avid reader of books these days and haven't been one for years now, mostly just going back and re-reading old favorites for kicks and to pass time -- but I sure hope his later novels are better than this one, or I am inclined to suggest the man's reputation as an excellent writer is unfounded.

Because of THE SHELTERING SKY, I am extremely reluctant to read his later novels, and his short stories, etc. for fear of wasting more money.

Depressingly Blissful.......2006-07-30

Like some other reviewers, I read "The Sheltering Sky" while in Morocco. Specifically, I read it while serving in Peace Corps on the border of Morocco and Algeria at the onset of another blistering Saharan summer. Having experienced a near-death illness that confined me to a mat on the floor in a sweltering concrete room the previous summer not far from the setting of the book, I identified strongly with the main character's predicament. It also sent me into a mental funk for the next few days dreading the coming months of 105+ heat in what was essentially a concrete oven of an apartment. That is just how impressive Paul Bowles' book is. Bowles spent the last half of his life in Morocco and captures North Africa skillfully. His description of a man spiraling down into his self-inflicted hell and a woman driven mad by the process is gripping. Though my own personal experience intensified the book's impact, it is quite accessible to anyone who has ever felt the urge of damn-it-all-to-hell self-destruction. If you are bothered by seemingly rational characters making irrational decisions, stay away. However, if you can't help but watch what happens when people push themselves to the edge, then this is the book for you.

Tea in the Sahara.......2006-07-15

"The Sheltering Sky" gives a cool existentialist sheen to an otherwise pretty conventional Orientalist romance. The story of three Westerners trying to find their metaphysical way against the exotic (and ultimately horrifying) backdrop of Morocco reduces North Africa to a kind of movie set for the "real" characters--the American couple Kit and Port, along with their friend Tunner--to explore the nature of existence. Bowles is good at describing the trash, poverty, bad food, and illness his characters discover in Africa. Instead of sweeping that under the rug, he makes it a key part of the story: it's through learning to accept the third-world filth that Kit and Port free themselves of Western convention, and come to embrace the emptiness behind the sheltering sky. But I think the real force of the novel isn't so much in its philosophy--a fashionable `50s existentialism--or its spare descriptions of the East, where Arabs aren't much more than talking landscape, but in its portrait of Paul and Jane Bowles, the glamorous writers in fashionable exile in Tangier. I get the impression Bowles was trying to deliver great scary truths, but what I enjoyed most about the novel was its fantasy of privileged escape from modern ennui.

P.S. Does anyone else find that "P.S." marketing insert in Harper Perennial editions as annoying as I do?

Westerners in Africa.......2006-06-26

I read this book while in Morocco. I remember my paranoia (which is already peaked at the time) increasing ten-fold. But still, it was engaging to read particularly because I was encountering the locations, people, and environment that is showcased by The Sheltering Sky. The plot is not the most compelling one though. So, I am unsure if this book is something I would have enjoyed if I wasn't already there.

Way overrated!.......2006-05-22

I was really disappointed by this book. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I like a novel with a plot and with characters who are at least plausible if not interesting. This book has neither. Given the glowing reviews here on Amazon, I kept reading on, assuming that "this has got to take off soon." It never did. Nothing led anywhere, nothing mattered, nothing happened. Maybe, as some previous reviewers suggested, that's the point: this book is about nothingness, and thereby makes a statement about the twentieth century soul. But if that's what I wanted, I could just have stared at a blank piece of paper for fifteen minutes. When I read a book, I want to engage with the book on some level, and I did not engage on any level whatsoever with this book. Maybe it's me, but all I can say is "Reader Beware." When they say that the desert is the main character, THEY'RE NOT KIDDING. If you're interested in people or plot, look elsewhere.

February House: The Story of W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under One Roof In Wartime America

Average customer rating:

What a great read!!!
That House on Middagh Street
The bump and grind of a literary bawdy house
Timely and beautifully written
A Marvelous trip down memory lane or, rather, Middagh Street

February House: The Story of W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under One Roof In Wartime America
Sherill Tippins
Manufacturer: Houghton Mifflin
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Authors | Arts & Literature | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books

Mid Atlantic | Regional U.S. | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 061841911X

Book Description

February House is the uncovered story of an extraordinary experiment in communal living, one involving young but already iconic writers -- and the country's best-known burlesque performer -- in a house at 7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn during 1940 and 1941. It was a fevered year-long party fueled by the appetites of youth and by the shared sense of urgency to take action as artists in the months before America entered the war. In spite of the sheer intensity of life at 7 Middagh, the house was for its residents a creative crucible. Carson McCullers's two masterpieces, The Member of the Wedding and The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, were born, bibulously, in Brooklyn. Gypsy Rose Lee, workman-like by day, party girl by night, wrote her book The G-String Murders in her Middagh Street bedroom. Auden -- who along with Britten was being excoriated at home in England for absenting himself from the war -- presided over the house like a peevish auntie, collecting rent money and dispensing romantic advice. And yet all the while he was composing some of the most important work of his career. Sherill Tippins's February House, enlivened by primary sources and an unforgettable story, masterfully recreates daily life at the most fertile and improbable live-in salon of the twentieth century.

Customer Reviews:

What a great read!!!.......2007-07-18

A friend just recommended this book to me and it's fabulous!!! I live in an artist bldg and it's nothing compared to the energy of Middagh Street. The book is a great read and the research is most impressive. I cannot wait to read the one she's writing about the Chelsea Hotel!

That House on Middagh Street.......2006-09-03

Thomas Wolf once famously said "only the dead know Brooklyn." There might be some truth in that, but some of us know Brooklyn, N.Y.,U.S.A., pretty well,and are still very much alive. Quite a few people are aware of Brooklyn's brownstone belt, that swath of historic houses stretching from the East River to Prospect Park and beyond. Many of these people would declare Brooklyn Heights the ultimate Brooklyn brownstone neighborhood. It's beautiful, and gets scenic views of Manhattan. It's got history galore--an important Revolutionary War battle was fought here;and it's been, and still is,home to a lot of well-known important people.

One little-known fact is that a number of celebrated people shared a house on Middagh Street, in 1940-41, right in the middle of the Second World War. That house, which came to be known as February House-- a number of its residents had February birthdays-- has long since been torn down to make room for the Promenade that provides storied views of Manhattan. But among occupants of February House were poet W.H.Auden, writer Carson McCullers, writers Jane and Paul Bowles,composer Benjamin Britten, and stripper Gypsy Rose Lee.

Writer Sherill Tippens has produced an interesting, pleasantly gossipy book about the house's residents and their accomplishments. Jane Bowles began "Two Serious Ladies," her only completed novel here. The young lesbian Carson McCullers had just tasted, at the age of 23, great success with her novel "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter." She began two other great successes, "The Member of the Wedding," and "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe," between drinking bouts, right here on Middagh Street.

Auden and Britten, both homosexual, but not involved with each other, were being raked over the coals at the time by the British press for choosing to sit out World War II in the U.S. But they were working: they collaborated on the opera "Paul Bunyan,"not critically well-received. Auden who continued to live in the Heights, on his own, to pursue his lifelong, unrequited love for the young American Chester Kallman, was working hard in the interstices of his personal soap opera: He produced "The Double Man" in February House. Britten produced "Peter Grimes;"considered one of the great masterpieces of 20th century opera. Meanwhile, he pursued his own personal soap opera: many critics believe this opera echoes developments with his partner, tenor Peter Pears, at the time.

The most unexpected resident of February House would have to be Gypsy Rose Lee, burlesque artiste. She was talked into joining the fun by George Davis, homosexual himself, fiction editor of "Harpers Bazaar" magazine, whose idea February House was, and who worked hard to keep it alive. Davis had published some of his own writing, but he was best known for the talented writers he kept on discovering.

In Gypsy Lee's case, she brought some money, a lot of common sense,and a cook to Middagh Street. The house's residents needed all the above. Her reward for her support: George Davis, great editor, midwifed her book, "The G-String Murders," a publishing sensation for many years.

George Davis continued to live at 7 Middaagh Street after its time as an artistic commune had passed. After Kurt Weill's death, Davis married his widow, Lotte Lenya, and devoted his life to introducing America to Weill's great works,such as "Three Penny Opera,"from which we get "Mack the Knife."

There are some informative photographs, extensive notes and acknowledgements in February House. Tippins evidently did a lot of primary research, but she managed to organize the voluminous results in a very readable style. February House well rewards the reader.

The bump and grind of a literary bawdy house.......2005-10-14

Sherill Tippins has done an amazing job of finding the significant narrative threads in the chaotic convergence of creative lives that occurred in the months before Pearl Harbor when Harper's Bazaar editor George Davis and British expatriate poet W.H. Auden rented a brownstone on 7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn Heights and actively recruited other creative artists to live with them. Among the co-renters were Carson McCullers who had recently published her highly acclaimed first novel, "The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter," soon-to-be famous British composer Benjamin Britten and his parnter, singer Peter Pears, unpublished novelists Paul and Jane Bowles, Broadway set designer Oliver Smith, writer Richard Wright and his wife, and burlesque sensation Gypsy Rose Lee, who it turns out was the most reliable in the rent-paying department and joined the little "creative commune" on the condition that she could bring her own cook and maid. Her fiscal reliability and drive along with Auden's willingness to take on the unpleasant role of house disciplinarian (collecting rent and other "dues" and establishing and enforcing many house rules) are probably sufficient explanation for why this menage managed to last the two or three years it did.

Tippins wisely focuses her attention on the leading figures (without neglecting to name the many others who partied but did not reside at 7 Middagh--Salvador and Gala Dali, Lincoln Kirstein, George Balanchine, Erika Mann and her brothers Klaus and Golo, to name a few). One passer-through, Anais Nin, christened the dwelling "February House" because so many of the residents had February birthdays. Tippins has a good knowledge of the works of these creative people and is able to see how one of the artists intentionally or inadvertantly influenced a subsequent work of one of his or her co-residents. For example, McCullers was struggling with the novel that would later become "The Member of the Wedding" when she was able to appropriate an experience from Chester Kallman's childhood to explain her heroine's profound sense of alienation and abandonment (Kallman was Auden's lover).

Tippins other great achievement here was her ability to slice through history and palpably recreate the political atmosphere in pre-war New York and to do so in a way that reflects on both British and US perspectives. She takes a good hard look at the criticism expatriates like Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Britten, and Pears faced from the British press and fellow artists who chose to remain in Great Britian during the war. She is similarly insightful in her analysis of the role the Mann family had in trying to get an apathetic America to respond to the European crisis. A lesser writer might not have bothered with these issues and chosen to report only the salacious and saleable anecdotes about the goings-on of the February House residents.

I highly recommend this book to anyone even passingly interested in one of the artists who lived at 7 Middagh Street (you're sure to learn something new), to anyone who ever wondered how great works of art come about, or to anyone interested in knowing how history and art intersect. I'm sure I'm going to use Tippins's Selecte Bibliography as a basis for future Amazon.com purchases.

Timely and beautifully written.......2005-09-08

Sherill Tippins' volume fills a tantalizing gap that fans of Auden, McCullers, Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee have long wished could be filled. Most overdue is Tippins' portrait of George Davis: failed literary wunderkind; editor extraordinaire (who "discovered" McCullers and got much-needed writing jobs for her and W. H. Auden in the lean months before Pearl Harbor); husband to Lotte Lenya and the catalyst that re-invented her for American audiences in Marc Blitzstein's staging of Weill's "Threepenny Opera"--the list goes on and on. Davis and Auden are central to Tippins' account and to the amazing colony of artists who called 7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn Heights their home in 1940-41. But Tippins gives everyone in that circle his/her due. Her depictions of Auden's rocky romance with Chester Kallman, of Benjamin Britten's coming to terms with his artistic destiny in England, not America, and Gypsy Rose Lee's ability to charm and disarm everyone she met are more than engaging--they are extremely moving.

Tippins' research is exhaustive and impeccable, and she lets her characters speak naturally and eloquently. I could not put this book down and practically read it at one sitting. I was hungry for the kind of information Tippins delivered, and I finished the book with the deepest satisfaction. Gracefully written, carefully organized and researched, and extremely relevant: this book wins on all counts.

A Marvelous trip down memory lane or, rather, Middagh Street.......2005-06-06

7 Middagh Street literally doesn't exist any longer. It was torn down to make way for an Expressway. During the last decade of his life the poet Frank O'Hara lived in four different apartments in Manhattan and at least one of them has a commemorative plague. If 7 Middagh Street were still standing the entire building would have to be bronzed. George Davis, the fiction editior for "Harper's Bizaar," rented and renovated the house with the assistance of friends W. H. Auden and Carson McCullers. Together they sought to create a kind of year round Yaddo - a boarding house for artists. They were joined by Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, Jane and Paul Bowles, Gypsy Rose Lee, Oliver Smith and Klaus Mann (among others). This is their story. As you can imagine, life at 7 Middagh Street was anything but boring.

This is the kind of biographical history I most enjoy reading. It focuses on a very specific period of time, communicating brilliantly the personal and professional triumphs and failures, as well as the ravaging effects of current world events these artists were dealing with while living together. It provides just the right balance of background material on each resident without ever becoming bogged down in trivial details that interrupt the natural progression of the story. Yes, there is a certain amount of "dirt." The spats between Auden and Paul Bowles are well documented, and the endless parade of sailors, the parties that lasted until dawn, the battling McCullers. Most of the residents, even those who were married, were either homosexual or bisexual. The book, and this history, is simply fascinating. If you care at all about 20th century art - literature and music especially - this is a book you shouldn't miss.

Average customer rating:

The Most Under-ratd American Author
More Bowles is Always Better
For Paul Bowles fans-this is a "must have".
heart of darkness
Infinite sadness in infinite places

The Stories of Paul Bowles
Paul Bowles
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Literary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

General | Short Stories | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Sheltering Sky
Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue: Scenes from the Non-Christian World
Spider's House: A Novel
Paul Bowles: The Sheltering Sky/ Let It Come Down/ The Spider's House (Library of America)
My Sister's Hand in Mine: The Collected Works of Jane Bowles

ASIN: 0061137049
Release Date: 2006-10-31

Book Description

The short fiction of American literary cult figure Paul Bowles is marked by a unique, delicately spare style, and a dark, rich, exotic mood, by turns chilling, ironic, and wry—possessing a symmetry between beauty and terror that is haunting and ultimately moral. In "Pastor Dowe at Tecaté," a Protestant missionary is sent to a faraway place where his God has no power. In "Call at Corazón," 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. Here also are some of Bowles's most famous works, including "The Delicate Prey," a grimly satisfying tale of vengeance, and "A Distant Episode," which Tennessee Williams proclaimed "a masterpiece."

Customer Reviews:

The Most Under-ratd American Author.......2004-01-22

This collection certifies Bowles brilliance. I have enjoyed his novels, but these fascinating short stories reveal him to be one of the greatest American writers of the century, perhaps the most under-rated American writer. I like the fact that his stories are often set in exotic locals like Morocco, S. America, Mexico, and Thailand. He is also good with stories about expats as well as those written form the point of view of locals, some of these stories comes across like parables.

There are several memorable stories, but "A Distant Episode" in particular is brilliant. It's about an ethnologist who goes to study a distant tribe and is drugged fed mushrooms, has his tongue cut out and made to dance before the tribe. His later stories lose none of his precision in story telling either; it is a solid body of work. Highly recommended, however buy the paperback it's a bit of a doorstop at 657 pages.

More Bowles is Always Better.......2002-04-15

Once you enter the smoky world of Bowles' winding alleys and doublespeaking faux guides, you won't remember how to get back to where you were before. Was is this turn? Behind that door?

For Paul Bowles fans-this is a "must have"........2002-04-12

After reading Paul Bowles "The Sheltering Sky" twice, I could not consume enough of his writing. He was to me, a writer's writer. He has a way of pulling you into his adventures without overloading you with minute useless details. His writing just flows from sentence to sentence while the reader is swept away effortlessly along whatever path he is taking. Obviously I am a big fan and having this huge collection of short stories was something I had to have for my Paul Bowles collection. Also check out "My Sister's Hand In Mine" a collection of short stories written by Paul Bowles wife, Jane Bowles, it's equally intriguing. What a fasinating life they must have had!

heart of darkness.......2001-12-30

A beautiful collection that certainly beats the old reliable Black Sparrow book. This is a class treatment of one of the best writers working the middle part of the century. (The intro is not particulary illuminating, however.) The lengthy review here by Doug Anderson gets the job done if you are new to Bowles. What strikes one upon revisiting Bowles is how contemporary he was in tone. These are hard-edged stories, dark and mysterious. World literature. A must collection for any serious reader of 20th century writing.

Infinite sadness in infinite places.......2001-10-25

There are many reasons to read Paul Bowles. One is for the strange atmospheres he describes, another is for the fragile, delicate and easily dissembled egos of his protaganists. A typical Bowles story introduces you to all of these elements at once, one playing or preying on the other. In these stories we see the unraveling of identity after identity and the impression that builds as one moves from one story to another is that there is nothing that can save this from happening to the unprotected or unsheltered westerner whose identity structure disintegrates so easily when divorced from the western setting it is so reliant on. This pattern is also evident in his famous novel Sheltering Sky, a document of one man seeking dissolution in the desert, the fact that he is with a wife and a friend only underline his inability to desire anything, he simply seeks to journey away from everything. In Bowles stories (which take place in both South American and North African settings) the westerner, often an American, is seen as an unwanted invader by the natives of the visited region. The anti-colonial sentiment is there in these stories but Bowles' westerners seem to be the only ones unaware of it. But that is just one aspect of these stories, each story also has at least one other unsavory aspect as well(murder, incest, rape, drugs). The natives of Bowles foreign locales are usually not given much in the way of individual identities, it is the westerners who are singled out for study, the stories take place in their minds and thought processes. The foreign locales serve merely as backdrops, though very atmospheric writing makes those backdrops part of these stories appeal. Bowles' westerners are all met at a time in their lives when they are at a breaking point(Echo)or seeking departure from the past(Pages From Cold Point), or a spouse (Call at Corazon). We see a missionary in one story slowly give up hope of ever communicating to the natives he wishes to convert, in fact he is more changed by the natives than they are by him(Pastor Dowe at Tacate). In another a photographer with insomnia, a very common ailment in these stories, finds himself responding in some strange way to his surroundings, he begins to let his surroundings speak to some deeper instinctual part of him, and he slowly gives over his old identity to it, but letting his gaurd down has only made him less careful and more vulnerable to those who see him as one who is somewhere he does not belong(Tapiama)and that can never lead to any good especially not in a Bowles story. These stories will remind readers more of Poe, a favorite of Bowles, than any of the colonial or postcolonial authors because the element in his fiction that stands out most is the instability of western identity which makes it ripe for corruption. These characters are not so much seeking to arrive somewhere as escape from whence they came so really the places these sometimes horrific dramas occur in are less important than the people to whom these horrors occur. Bowles did spend his entire writing career in North Africa and South America so the stories are rich with details but they remain settings merely, however elaborate.

Paul Bowles: Collected Stories and Later Writings (Library of America)

Average customer rating:

The Master of Lucid Insanity and Polished Miscommunication

Paul Bowles: Collected Stories and Later Writings (Library of America)
Paul Bowles
Manufacturer: Library of America
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Classics | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Literary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

United States | Short Stories | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Paul Bowles: The Sheltering Sky/ Let It Come Down/ The Spider's House (Library of America)
Saul Bellow: Novels 1944-1953: Dangling Man, The Victim, and The Adventures of Augie March (Library of America)
John Dos Passos: Travel Books and Other Writings 1916-1941 (Library of America)
Philip Roth: Novels and Stories 1959-1962: Goodbye, Columbus & Five Short Stories / Letting Go (Library of America)
Philip Roth: Novels 1967-1972: When She Was Good / Portnoy's Complaint / Our Gang / The Breast (Library of America)

ASIN: 1931082200
Release Date: 2002-08-22

Customer Reviews:

The Master of Lucid Insanity and Polished Miscommunication.......2005-03-03

Like H.P. Lovecraft, Paul Bowles was an early admirer of Edgar Allen Poe's work. His collected short works (67 stories and essays, and one stunning short novel) is a treasurehouse of polished gems of a most peculiar variety. Bowles' specialty is in leaving the reader disconcerted, uncomfortable--even annoyed and sometimes horrified. His prose is lapidary--effortless, clear, and dangerous in the extreme. His psychological realism focuses on the darker sides of humanity--the ignorant, the misguided, the superstitious, the incomprehending, and the insane. His stories often seem to end without resolution. However, "seem" is the key word: Bowles clearly revels in the creation of states of ill ease in his readers. One might deem him H.P. Lovecraft on Prozak: restrained, controlled, but nevertheless a master of horror. Bowles' horror is all the more powerful for being so eloquent and dispassionate.

By far the best work of this volume, and probably of Bowles' entire corpus, is the concluding short novel UP ABOVE THE WORLD. It's devastating. Nightmarish, even fiendish in its narrative technique, I'm surprised that Hollywood never has attempted a version. Its vision has been called, not inappropriately, nihilistic: the bad guys here quite clearly win. Nevertheless, it bears witness to a darkness that sincerely pervades our modern world, doubtlessly more than we would care to acknowledge.

Bowles specializes in exploring the minds of characters who don't comprehend their environments, whether social or physical. As readers, we ourselves beccome trapped by the limitations of these often pathetic, sometimes horrendous denizens of the global village. He's especially good at entering the minds of non-Western characters. I should think our forces in Iraq would do well to be intimate with Bowles' astute psychological voyages.

Bowles never will be for everyone. He's too intelligent, too polished, and too dark. I view him as a kind of vaccine against complacency in these current times of overwhelming anomie.

Average customer rating:

The late "rediscovery" of Bowles...
Good way to get into bowles
A truly great collection
Fantastic Short story collection, direct and poetic

Collected Stories, 1939-1976
Paul Frederic Bowles
Manufacturer: Black Sparrow Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Anthologies | Short Stories | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

General | Short Stories | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Customer Reviews:

The late "rediscovery" of Bowles..........2006-03-18

This book, along with Gore Vidal's incredible introduction, led to a revitalization of the work of Paul Bowles. For far too long most of this work languished in out of print obscurity. But a sentence such as "His short stories are among the best ever written by an American" from the likes of Gore Vidal helped raise eyebrows along with intrigue. New versions of Bowles' work began to appear in the 1980s and eventually led to Bernardo Bertolucci's 1990 film of Bowles' most famous novel, "The Sheltering Sky". Bowles thus had the privilege of being rediscovered late in life (he died in Morocco in 1999 at age 88).

Bowles lived in Morocco for the vast majority of his life. An accomplished composer (trained by Aaron Copland in his youth) and writer, he remained and remains somewhat obscure (or as Vidal puts it "famous among those who were famous"). He writes mostly about non-european cultures, particularly Arabic or Islamic. Many times he said that he wrote from the subconscious; as though he wasn't aware of what he wrote. Some of the stories such as "The Scorpion", "By the Water" (featuring the surreal creature Lazrag), and "You Are Not I" (with its mindboggling midscene character shift) read as though the words did fall from some other dimension. Other stories seem to bear the marks of solid planning, such as "Call at Corazón" (a portrait of a rather unsuccessful marriage unfolding on a South American river), "Under the Sky" ("you are saving your friend's life"), "How Many Midnights" (a surprisingly standard story about a young couple), the nearly epic "The Hours After Noon" (where impressions and reality do not meet), and "Tea on the Mountain" (a very early story). Regardless of how Bowles wrote them, they all share a common undertow of terror of an Edgar Allen Poe style (Bowles once claimed in an interview that his mother read Poe to him before bed(!!!)). Bowles often gets credited for successfully depicting the threads that civilzation hangs on. And the terrors that await beneath the surface.

Some of Bowles' most brilliant creations stem from europeans attempting to infiltrate non-european cultures. "A Distant Episode" tells the disturbing story of a linguist captured by a Moroccan clan who violently turn him into a jester-esque fool. "Pastor Dowe at Tacaté" tells the story of a South American missionary that ends up "bribing" a group of people into hearing scripture by playing the song "Crazy Rhythm" on a victrola. He becomes too successful. In a gesture of thanks the leader of the group offers his very young daughter to the pastor. Which wasn't exactly what the pastor had in mind. The fantastic "The Time of Friendship" depicts the attempts of a German woman to "Christianize" a young Muslim boy. She memorably builds him a crèche. And he memorably doesn't respond to it the way she hopes. Bowles has an uncanny ability to portray the confusion and frustration of clashing cultures without making either side look ridiculous or inferior. When he writes tragic stories about people getting mistreated or misunderstood in other cultures, it never comes across as spiteful or racist. It seems strangely sympathetic regardless of the pain or horrors depicted. "The Delicate Prey" probably stands as the best example of this. It's downright disturbing. And violently sadistic. In such ways, Bowles' fiction actually teaches us about facing other cultures, and the problems and potential terrors that can arise if one "gets lost". Although he also presents a humorous example with the late story "You Have Left Your Lotus Pods on the Bus". Here a westerner spends the day with a group of Thai Buddhist monks ("What is the significance of the necktie?").

This collection presents a great overiew of the bulk of Bowles' short story output. The thick meaty stories of the 1940s gradually give way to the lighter stories of the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1970s many of the stories run only a few pages. But they maintain their intensity. "Allal" ends the book brilliantly with the story of a boy who enters the psychic perspective of a colorful snake. It evokes the same mood as the gorgeous earlier story "The Circular Valley" in which a spirit (an "Atlájala") enters a couple in love and storms off with disgust.

With the possible exception of the four kif-inspiried stories from the 1960s this collection offers up no disappointments. It demonstrates Bowles at his best. Anyone curious about this still rather obscure writer can start with this book. It includes most of Bowles' most acclaimed work. And at the end readers will likely wonder how this innovative storyteller continues to remain in the shadows of obscurity.

Good way to get into bowles.......2000-01-30

A fabulous collection by one of the better fiction writers from this century. If you are new to Bowles, this is an excellent way to dig in and see and what he is about. East/West cultural differences, bizarre mysticism and brutality are some of the main ideas explored here with his characteristic almost dead-pan descriptions that are both beautiful and brutal in their honesty. Learn why he has been cited as one of the best writers by everyone from the Beats to Raymond Carver. Set apart from them all in Africa, he still managed to influence all of them in major ways. Open it and enjoy.

A truly great collection.......1999-10-10

At his best, Bowles is rarely matched as a short story writer (A Distant Episode, The Frozen Fields, Pastor Dowe at Tacate, The Time of Friendship, The Delicate Prey, etc.). Precise, detached prose which often sustains a terrifying and revealing intensity of atmosphere. Any fans of "horror" would love this, though much of the terror is implied, psychological. There's also a few 4-5 pg. hallucinogenic (sp?) pieces which don't do much for me. Well worth reading. And reading (have read A Distant Episode three times).

Fantastic Short story collection, direct and poetic.......1998-07-07

I love the stories of Paul Bowles. One of the few writers which spins a web of magic around his short stories without overdosing in adjectives. The worlds of bowles are often drawn in pure, brutal, indegenious colours, which you can nearly smell and taste when you read them. Many stories of him play in morocco (or south america), and if you want to learn something of these exciting countries and the culture, this is one of the best sources. It shows how much we can try to feel at home at foreign places and yet seldom succeed. Always in our head,ethoncentristic with friendship as the only real link to the other world. Bowles stories often leave me breathless at the end. They build up so much hope, so much plasticity and leave you nothing when you turn the last page. But even if the aftertaste seems to be a bitter one, you get enchanted, you read the next story, you want more. Then something after ten or fifteen books you can't wait to take the next plane to Africa... In some sense Bowles can be related to the Beat literature. The only thing is that Bowles didn't move on. He stayed in Tanger and his view of the world got much sharper than the one of the other beats. His protagonists still like to travel, they are searching for something, but what they find is beyond their dreams. It is naked realism and so strong that the mind begins to spin... (Look for P.B - Let it come down) LIGHT A CANDLE, READ A SHORT STORY OF THIS MARVELOUS COLLECTION AND WATCH FOR RESULTS...

If the short story "garden" will not enchanten you you probably are in desperate need of some of that moroccon majoun.

Amazon.com

Paul Bowles once said that a story should remain taut throughout, like a piece of string. That tense, stretched tone is the key to this collection of 17 eerie tales by the author best known for The Sheltering Sky. The Delicate Prey is dedicated: "For my mother, who first read me the stories of Poe." If Poe had lived in Mexico, and he'd had ice water running in his veins to counteract his feverish romanticism, he might have crafted something like these odd vignettes about human frailty and cruelty. The setting is a world where palm trees are like "shiny green spiders," where bats reel silently overhead in a jet-black sky, where a hot, relentless wind blows across deserted plazas.

As Tobias Wolff writes in Esquire, "The Delicate Prey is in fact one of the most profound, beautifully wrought, and haunting collections in our literature.... 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 entirely its own, capable of instantly modulating from farce to horror without a ruffle."

Customer Reviews:

Post Colonial Blues.......2006-06-21

DP contains most of Bowles' classic gems, and it provides a good introduction to the kind of thing you will be encountering when you get old enough to take on THE SHELTERING SKY and LET IT COME DOWN. A musician by training, he took on writing as a sort of hobby, then became obssessed with it to the negkect of his music, as he relates in his breezy, atypical memoir WITHOUT STOPPING, written much later in life when he had attained a sort of Buddha-like, or Burroughs-like I don;'t care attitude about the things that had troubled him earlier. When this book first appeared it must have been one tremendous shock after another, and a few of the stories still carry an explosive charge.

One of the best tales seems to be an allegory of Bowles' progress from music to writing. In A DISTANT EPISODE, a professor of music gets abducted by desert bandits who remove his tongue and "train" him into becoming a dancing clown, like a monkey owned by a hurdy-gurdy man. They exhibit him widely, and his brain is so badly damaged that he is content with his retardation, knowing only the blows of his captors, until one afternoon when he accidentally hears some bars of Western music. He starts to cry and bawl his head off, he knows not why. It is a thoroughly repulsive story, but it displays beautifully the ambiguity with which Bowles viewed his long-ago music career, which he must after awhile have remembered only through a thousand veils.

PAGES FROM COLD POINT is pretty stronr too, not to say ripe. In Belize in the Caribbean, a wealthy American gay man comes to stay in a seaside mansion with his 16 year old son, Racky, the apple of his eye. What he doesn't know is that Racky is the bad seed incarnate, like a male Lolita, sex in dungarees. Racky enjoys going to every man and boy on the island, black or white, and seducing them, for he is so lovely no one would say no to him. Eventually the elders and the women decide to put the hammer down and warn the dad to take his slutty boy off the island or trouble will ensue. You won't believe what happens next, but it is worthy of a great porn movie. Radley Metzger might have made you believe it, but for Paul Bowles it was just another day in the life.

Outside Civilizations Walls.......2001-08-29

"Delicate Prey", the title story, is one of the most memorable stories I've ever encountered. This story of a young flute player and his uncles who are Arab traders crossing a remote desert region begins innocently enough but soon a stranger appears on the horizon who comes closer and closer. This desert episode is told with a perfect accumulation of atmospheric detail and just the barest amount of human detail to place this tale in the realm of myth. The tale involves many things that will later appear in Bowles' other short fictions including hashish and flute music and other things that will go unmentioned so as not to spoil their discovery by new readers. "At Paso Rojo" is a story set in South America on a ranch. There two sisters go after their mothers death to live with their brother. As the sisters settle in one sister especially decides she wants to live a freer life than women in the cities are allowed to live and she begins to allow herself liberties that shock her more conservative sister. As she rides through the wild jungle her horse bolts and the sensations she has impart to the reader that hers is no ordinary psychology. Used to suppressing her sexuality while her mother was alive she begins to explore her power as a woman and as events unfold we see that this power has sprouted something in her that cannot be mistaken for anything but pure evil. Every story in this collection presents striking locales and lurid acts. The appeal of them is partly in the exoticism of the locales and partly in the allure of the lurid. Bowles aesthetic is a strange one but his tales could not be delivered with any more force. The collection is dedicated to Poe, and appropriately so, but the depth of the psychological examination of different kinds of pathologies lend these stories a power that magnifies their effect beyond mere horror stories. They are stories of modern psyches with the superficial but protective veneer of civilization removed.

Strange, morbid and fascinating.......2001-07-13

Not everyone will enjoy thse weird stories mostly set in Mexico or Morocco. They contain violence and, in a way, sex, although sex is never explicitly described. They almost always end in disaster, sometimes grotesque and cruel disaster. The sexual element is never quite straight heterosexual attraction between consenting adults. A frequent plot is that someone is invited somewhere by a host who becomes hostile or takes a journey following an unreliable guide that ends badly. Think DH Lawrence, Joyce Carol Oates, Roald Dahl, Truman Capote and, as regards the prose style. maybe even Raymond Carver He is a minimalist with a way of bringing an exotic setting to life in half a sentence without an adjective or adverb. A remarkable thing is how long ago the stories were written and how modern the style seems.

A Stunning Collection!.......2000-05-24

This is a must-read for anyone interested in 20th century American literature. An absolutely stunning collection of tales that provoke, disturb and intoxicate the reader. Bowles writes in a style that is almost clinical: dry, precise and elegant, which accentuates the horrors he describes all the more. Hailed by such writers and Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer as a modern classic, you should not fail to read it if you have not already done so. And if enjoyed this title, check out The Sheltering Sky and Let it Come Down.

Too Far from Home: The Selected Writings of Paul Bowles

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one of those

Too Far from Home: The Selected Writings of Paul Bowles
Paul Bowles
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Anthologies | Short Stories | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

General | Short Stories | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Book Description

A striking collection of stories, poems, letters, travel essays, journal entries, excerpts from three novels, and more—including the complete text of The Sheltering Sky—from one of the most revered authors of the twentieth century

Customer Reviews:

one of those.......2001-04-06

One of those collections that cuts up larger works.

Studies in Short Fiction Series - Paul Bowles (Studies in Short Fiction Series)

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Allen Hibbard - A Study of the Short Fiction

Studies in Short Fiction Series - Paul Bowles (Studies in Short Fiction Series)
Hibbard
Manufacturer: Twayne Publishers
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

African-American & Black | Ethnic & National | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books

African | History & Criticism | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

United States | Short Stories | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

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All Titles | Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007 | Stores | Books
ASIN: 0805783180

Book Description

Series Editors: Gary Scharnhorst, University of New Mexico and Eric Haralson, State University of New York, Stony Brook

This is the only series to provide in-depth critical introductions to major modern and contemporary short story writers worldwide. Each volume offers:

A comprehensive overview of the artist's short fiction-including detailed analyses of every significant story
Interviews, essays, memoirs and other biographical materials -- often previously unpublished
A representative selection of critical responses
Acomprehensive primary bibliography, a selected bibliography of important criticism, a chronology of the artist's life and works and an index

Customer Reviews:

Allen Hibbard - A Study of the Short Fiction.......2000-11-06

Hibbard's book on the study of the short fiction of Paul Bowles is easily the best that is available on the subject, and Hibbard covers just about everything that the reader would want to know.

The book is split into 3 sections: 1) The Short Fiction 2) The Writer and 3) The Critics. There are also many interviews with Bowles in this book, as well as many critical essays.

The main books covered are: 'The Delicate Prey', 'A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard', 'The Time of Friendship', 'Things Gone and Things Still Here', 'Midnight Mass' and 'Unwelcome Words and other stories'.

I recommend this book to any serious student of the fiction of Paul Bowles, as well as the casual reader, because this book is written in a readily understandable format, which in itself is very useful.

A Distant Episode: The Selected Stories
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Tales of Those Away From Home

A Lost, Wondrous Hollowness

Walking into the dark, sinister desert of perverse fantasy.

Walking into the dark, sinister desert of perverse fantasy.

A Distant Episode: The Selected Stories
Paul Bowles
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
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General | Short Stories | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
Bowles, Paul | ( B ) | Authors, A-Z | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 0061137383
Release Date: 2006-06-13

Amazon.com

Movement and dark exotica are the hallmarks of any Paul Bowles story. In the title piece a linguist bums his way down on a bus to "the warm country" in what may well be Morocco, returning to a town--and a friend--he has not seen in 10 years. He learns that the friend has died and, overcome by a perverse and almost exalted carelessness, makes a curious proposition to the qaouaji who serves him tea. The strange becomes the sinister; the lonely becomes a hallucinatory horror. When the unspeakable finally comes to pass (the dogs, the guns, the evil men), it's a relief.

The characters in these stories are shaped and fated by place. "The pleasure of writing stories, as opposed to novels," Bowles observes in the preface, "lies in the freedom to allow protagonists to invent their own personalities as they emerge from the landscape." The collection that ensues, chosen by the author and written over a 40-year period, reflects this creed. And the improvisational feel of the works comes precisely from the power place is accorded as the dominant force on characters and their actions.

Characters adrift in menacingly unfamiliar places--Algeria, Marrakech, Colombia--are people exiled or en route to exile. For two such travelers, this might be a quintessential Bowles moment:

He: "You think you humor me so much? I haven't noticed it." His voice was sullen.

She: "I don't humor you at all. I'm just trying to live with you on an extended trip in a lot of cramped little cabins on an endless series of stinking boats."

Bowles's delivery--deadpan, without affectation, hyperbole, or discourse--sets up a disconcerting and delicious tension. Fate, in each story, is allowed to play itself out with no authorial summing-up, no interjection against the intractable landscape. Remember that Bowles country acknowledges a debt to the sensibilities of such literary peers as Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Jay McInerney. Don't look for meaning in the obvious places. Let it emerge like insights and connections made from the stuff of the subconscious. Regardless, this collection offers the good old-fashioned experience of excellent fiction--from a writer who will blow your assumptions about the world wide open.

Book Description

A Distant Episode contains the best of Paul Bowles's short stories, as 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.

Customer Reviews:

Tales of Those Away From Home.......2001-11-09

Bowles likes to place his characters in situations where all the usual comforts have been removed. So his locations are remote ones. South America and North Africa are two of his favorite. The characters in these stories are usually sensitive types and so are already fragile and impressionble but in the unusual settings those characterictics are even more evident and make them especially vulnerable. Bowles characters are travelers set against native cultures and in such conditions the traveler is always at a disadvantage because he has left behind those things which have served to stabilize his life. The traveler is merely adrift in the world, while the natives of the visited region have remained rooted to a very old culture. America itself is a very young culture, a colonial culture, and the authors that Bowles admired were those early colonial writers like Poe. Bowles in a way continues with Poe's themes of Americans lost in the untamed wilderness of themselves. But also in Bowles writing one can feel the influence of writers he was contemporary with like Camus, who also experienced colonialism as he was raised in North Africa under French rule. There is violence in Bowles work of many kinds but always along with the violence is some discovery about either an individual or about the nature of the world in general or both as the violent act often serves to strip away a characters long held illusions which kept a certain version of the world in place and reveal a more primitive more vital world beneath. The stories by and large take place in the mind of the traveling westerner, though one story is told through the eyes of an Arab. You can get a complete collection of Bowles stories for about twice the price but this collection contains all the stories he is known for including the title story and Delicate Prey, his two most famous.But there are at least a dozen stories here which once read will never be forgotten.

A Lost, Wondrous Hollowness.......2000-12-20

Paul Bowles will go down as the only writer of the soi-disant "Beat" generation worth a look at. In my opinion, of course, he ALREADY is the only one of them with a mote of talent. And what a talent it is!!-His style is original and inimitable. His writings convey a feeling totally unlike any other writer's....But what is it? The paradox is that since it's so original and unlike anything else, it's difficult to find words and comparisons to convey to the would-be reader why to buy this book. Almost all the reviews aver that Bowles' characters are defined by place. This is eminently the case. In fact, one might say that his characters are SO defined by place that they aren't really "characters" at all, but mere functions of the universes they find themselves in (rather harsh and bleak ones, to understate things a bit). -Reading these stories, you actually begin to lose a sense of self: YOUR self. That's how powerful Bowles' writing is. What you are left with is, of course, a hollowness, on the one hand, in finding that you have lost your sense of identity. But you have gained something: a lost wonder, beautiful and terrifying, of what existence, after all, is, that captures something of what a child feels at times. But the comparison with a child's view is to simplify things enormously. What you really gain, to put things perhaps a bit awkwardly, is the terror and wonder of being alive. The Greeks had a word for this feeling, Deinos. We don't have such a word, a word that so effectively combines the feelings of terror and wonder. - It's where we get the word dinosaur from, if that helps any.-But this may be beside the point. Just read the book...and...you'll see...

Walking into the dark, sinister desert of perverse fantasy........2000-09-05

Reading these stories, set in North Africa where Bowles lived, is like like roaming some lonely alien landscape while being helplessly asaulted by feelings of dread, wonder, strangeness, and beauty. Lacking much descriptive prose,these stories are naked, simple, raw. Gradualy the self dissolves, the character's behaivor is so defined by their enviroment that they become part of it . The reader, too, melts into the background. East and west colide violently, explode ; and nothing remains but the stark terror and magic of life. Own of Bowles best. A must forWilliam Burroughs fans too.

Walking into the dark, sinister desert of perverse fantasy........2000-09-05

Reading these stories, set in North Africa where Bowles lived, is like like roaming some lonely alien landscape while being helplessly asaulted by feelings of dread, wonder, strangeness, and beauty. Lacking much descriptive prose,these stories are naked, simple, raw. Gradualy the self dissolves, the character's behaivor is so defined by their enviroment that they becme part of it . The reader, too, melts into the background. East and west colide violently, explode ; and nothing remains but the stark terror and magic of life. Own of Bowles best. A must forWilliam Burroughs fans too.

Midnight Mass (Peter Owen Modern Classic)

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Morroccan tales

Midnight Mass (Peter Owen Modern Classic)
Paul Bowles
Manufacturer: Peter Owen Ltd
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

General | Short Stories | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Customer Reviews:

Morroccan tales.......2000-03-26

Paul Bowles was always a unique writer. An expatriate American who went to Morrocco and stayed. Midnight Mass is a collection of his short stories written after 1976. It is a great companion piece to his Collected Stories which gathers his stories prior to 1976. Bowles can be difficult to read because he became so emmershed in Morroccan culture it is quite, shall we say, foreign to Western readers. This is not the writing of an American. Paul Bowles became like a Morroccan in his years in Tangier. If you want to learn a little about Morroccan culture this is a good place to start. Stories like The Eye and Madame and Ahmed hit the mark. It is, overall, an outstanding collection. It is great for lovers of literature in general as well as for Morroccan neophytes.

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