by Paul Bowles
First published 2009
An American writer observes the dusty streets of Tangier, the humid jungles of Guatemala, the faces of people whose worlds he can never fully enter. Paul Bowles places his characters at the edges of familiar territory, where Western assumptions crumble against different ways of being. His protagonists find themselves changed by encounters with landscapes that dwarf human concerns and cultures that operate by alien logic. A businessman discovers his carefully constructed self dissolving in the Saharan heat. A traveler realizes the jungle has rewritten the rules of survival. These Americans abroad face a fundamental question: what happens when the person you thought you were no longer fits the world you inhabit? Bowles maps the territory where identity becomes fluid and civilization reveals itself as just another kind of performance.
Genres: short-stories, literary-fiction, american-fiction, 20th-century
Vibes: atmospheric, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: fish-out-of-water, identity-crisis
Setting: Guatemala, Sahara, Tangier
Period: 1939-1976
417 pages · Hardcover · Black Sparrow Press