I have tried not to think too often about the long shadow that Paul Bowles casts over Tangier, but this year’s commemorations have made it hard to avoid: the twentieth anniversary of Bowles’s death and the seventieth of The Sheltering Sky’s publication. In Tangier, celebrations to mark this “existential masterpiece” are under way, including balls and masquerade parties. And so I’ve found myself again asking how this genteel American writer came to be so bound up with Morocco, and how, in recent years, he has become a figure of both nostalgia and contention. – New York Review of Books