In Touch: The Letters of Paul Bowles - Hardcover

Bowles, Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374185107 ISBN 13: 9780374185107

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1994

Synopsis

A collection of correspondence from the author of The Sheltering Sky discusses his attempts to record primitive Moroccan music, nature and the craft of writing, the Beat writers, living in North Africa, and other topics.

About this title

Review:

[Bowles' letters] are full of dazzling descriptions of faraway places. . . . [The collection] is a fascinating, tonic history of the counterculture. "Kirkus Reviews"

It's the beauty of Bowles' writing that makes "In Touch" especially engaging. "Entertainment Weekly""

"[Bowles' letters] are full of dazzling descriptions of faraway places. . . . [The collection] is a fascinating, tonic history of the counterculture." --Kirkus Reviews

"It's the beauty of Bowles' writing that makes In Touch especially engaging." --Entertainment Weekly

From the Back Cover:

Despite Paul Bowles's legendary reclusiveness, he has always been an indefatigable correspondent, and this marvellous collection of his letters, spanning eight decades, provides a unique insight into the many aspects of his brilliant and diverse career – as composer, novelist, travel writer, translator, ethnographer and critic.

From his earliest surviving letter, written at the age of four, to his precocious teenage effusions to Gertrude Stein, from his meditations on the effects of mescaline to his intensely moving letters to his wife Jane during her last illness, 'In Touch' fills in the gaps left by previous biographers and by Bowles's autobiography 'Without Stopping' (so notoriously unrevealing that William Burroughs nicknamed it 'Without Telling').

Here is Paul Bowles on the genesis of his novels, on his dogged expeditions attempting to record Moroccan tribal music; on the Beats, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams; on the nature and craft of writing; on appearing as an elderly extra in Bernardo Bertolucci's film of 'The Sheltering Sky'. Among many others, his correspondents include William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Henry Miller. Gossipy, reflective, surprising, enlightening and always entertaining, 'In Touch' is an epistolary autobiography by one of the greatest, and most private, writers of our time, and a remarkable portrait of the twentieth-century avant-garde, from Tristan Tzara to David Byrne.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0374185107
• ISBN 13: 9780374185107
• Binding: Hardcover
• Editor: Miller Jeffrey