Conversations with Paul Bowles

For the past forty years Paul Bowles has answered questions about the autobiographical references in his novels (The Sheltering Sky, Let It Come Down, The Spider's House, and Up Above the World) and about his work as a composer in New York, all the time insisting, "I don't want anyone to know about me.".

Yet in this collection of interviews dating from 1952 to the present, Bowles gives a variety of answers that reveal as much as they conceal. Too gracious to refuse interviews, he regards inquiries with the same clear-eyed detachment that marks his prose, wondering, "Why is it that Americans expect an artist's work to be a reflection of his life? They never seem to want to believe that the two can be independent of each other and go their separate ways.".

Despite his reticence, Bowles frankly discusses his "unconscious" writing practice, his views on the "illiterate imagination," existentialism, his various experiments with altered states of consciousness, and nearly fifty years of expatriate life in Morocco.

Included here are three interviews never before published, several that originally appeared in now obscure journals, plus interviews conducted by Jay McInerny for Vanity Fair, Jeffrey Bailey for the Paris Review, and Michael Rogers for the Rolling Stone.