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...

A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard

Paul Bowles

These are four tales of contemporary life in a land where cannabis, rather than alcohol, customarily provides a way out of the phenomenological world. Thus, of the men in these stories, Salam uses suggestions supplied by smoking kif to rid himself of...

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Dust on Her Tongue

Rodrigo Rey Rosa

Set in Guatemala, these spare and beautiful tales are linked by themes of magic, violence, and the fragility of existence. Paul Bowle's translation perfectly captures Rey Rosa's stories of the haunted lives of ordinary people in present-day Central...

The Beggar's Knife

Rodrigo Rey Rosa

From one of Guatemala's finest young writers, these twenty-six stories-at once brutal and intensely lyrical-are peopled with sorcerers, ghosts, and assassins. Springing from myth and beliefs indigenous to Central America and North America, where...

The Oblivion Seekers

Isabelle Eberhardt

Isabelle Eberhardt was an unusual woman, and we're fortunate to glimpse her unique meld of European angst and Algerian verve. We're equally lucky for Paul Bowles's sympathetic, robust biography that precedes Eberhardt's 13 short stories. Born in...

M'Hashish

Mohammed Mrabet

"Ah," said Hassan, "I don't believe in the world. There's another world where life is different." These are stories of that world. The word m'hashish (equivalent in Moghrebi of "behashished" or "full of hashish") is used only in a literal sense, but...