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Call at Corazón forms, with Midnight Mass,
Pages from Cold Point and A Thousand Days for Mokhtar
(also published as Peter Owen Modern Classics), part of the
definitive selection of the short stories Gore Vidal called
‘among the best ever written by an American’.
Written over a period of almost fifty years, these gripping
tales span several continents, from New York to Mexico to
the North Africa Bowles made quintessentially his own. The
pieces range from short psychological thrillers, to breathtaking
evocations of exotic places, to incisive depictions of everyday
life. But all are linked by the dominant theme of alienation:
between a husband and wife (in the title story), the traveller
and a foreign culture and, in the end, between human beings
and the world around them.
‘Short stories don’t come
much better than those in Call at Corazón.’ – Sunday Express
‘The undisputed laureate of Morocco.’ – Daily
Telegraph
‘Bowles places his tightly structured stories next to
absolute chaos so that there is a balance: the balance between
something-ness or good and nothingness or evil.’– Kathy Acker, Guardian
‘Charming, erotic, nasty and completely authentic . .
. this collection retains a constant standard of
excellence.’ – Sunday Times
PAUL BOWLES (1910 – 1999) was born in New York and came
to Europe in 1931 to study music with Aaron Copland. In 1938
he married Jane Auer, herself a gifted writer, who was to
achieve literary fame under her married name of Jane Bowles.
After the war they settled in Tangier, which became their
permanent home. Paul Bowles is the author of The Sheltering
Sky, which has since become a modern classic and which
was filmed in 1990 by Bernardo Bertolucci. His other books
include Let It Come Down, Points in Time and
The Spider’s House. |
