In Touch

This extraordinary collection of correspondence by Paul Bowles spans eight decades and provides an evolving portrait of an artist renowned for his privacy. From his earliest extant letter written at the age of four to his precocious effusions to Aaron Copeland and to Gertrude Stein; from his meditations on mescaline as relayed to Ned Rorem to his intensely moving letters to Jane Bowles during her illness In Touch fills in the lacunae left by previous biographers and offers a rare look at the many aspects of Bowles''s brilliant career―as composer novelist short-story master travel writer translator ethnographer and literary critic. Here is Bowles on the genesis of his first novel The Sheltering Sky; on his distaste for Western melodies and his dogged attempts to record indigenous Moroccan music; on the Beats Gore Vidal Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams; on the nature and craft of writing; on Bernardo Bertolucci David Byrne and Sting; on the decline of American and the challenges of living in North Africa. Gossipy reflective enlightening and always entertaining In Touch stands as an epistolary autobiography of one of the legendary writers of our time and a unique chronicle of the twentieth-century avant-garde.