"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 entirley its own." —Tobias Wolff

An American cult figure, Paul Bowles has fascinated such disparate talents as Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, Truman Capote, William S. Burroughs, Gore Vidal, and Tobias Wolff. From "The Delicate Prey" to "Too Far from Home," this definitive

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As the mercenary captain of the Lady Corsair, Yasmeen has learned to keep her heart as cold as steel, her loyalty bound to her ship and crew. So when a man who once tried to seize her airship returns from the dead, she'll be damned if she gives him another opportunity. But treasure-hunter Archimedes Fox isn't interested in the Lady Corsair - he wants her coldhearted captain and the valuable da Vinci sketch she stole from him. To reclaim it, he's determined...

Tangier tells two parallel stories: one, a mystery, and the other a spy story set fifty years apart and told in a series of alternating sections. In the first, we follow Christopher Chaffee, a disgraced Washington power broker whose father, a French diplomat, died in a Vichy prison in 1944-or so he had always believed until a letter, received decades after it was posted, upends his life. Soon he is reluctantly inspecting the corkscrew of his own life...

In this lyrical, hallucinatory novel set in Morocco, Tahar Ben Jelloun offers an imaginative and radical critique of contemporary Arab social customs and Islamic law. The Sand Child tells the story of a Moroccan father's effort to thwart the consequences of Islam's inheritance laws regarding female offspring. Already the father of seven daughters, Hajji Ahmed determines that his eighth child will be a male. Accordingly, the infant, a girl, is named...

"Hamou Badi is born in a mountain village with the magical signs of the zouhry on his hands. In Morocco, the zouhry is a figure of legend, a child of both humans and djinns, capable of finding all manner of treasure: lost objects, hidden water. But instead, Hamou finds a body. This unsolved murder instils in Hamou a deep desire for order and justice: he trains as an officer of the law, working for the French in Casablanca. But the city is trapped...