The trick with historical novels is to make them equally specific and general. Reading them a long time after the events they depict have transpired, one should ideally feel the same sense of urgency of history being lived and written, as well as comprehending the socio-political context of their...
"He did not think of himself as a tourist; he was a traveler. The difference is partly one of time, he would explain. Whereas a tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly, over periods of yea...
The pieces included in Points in Time are brief and dreamlike, and entirely effective in painting a historical portrait of Bowles' adopted homeland, Morocco. Although written twenty-five years ago, these short prose poems are surprisingly effective at exploring the divide between Islam and the W...
The Delicate Prey, yeah, and they are, but I had a feeling that if I could peak out of the corner of my eye when no one was looking that I would see a predator licking someone else's blood off their own paws. They would curl into a tired ball after a fit of violence they wouldn't have wanted to h...
Heretofore he had not known anyone professing that faith, none having chanced to visit the Franciscan monastery where he had lived, and he was amazed, after an hour’s talk with this Moroccan gentleman, to find him not only wholly conversant with Christian doctrine, but actually in accord with cer...
On all sides the ground sloped gently downward toward the tangled, hairy jungle that filled the circular valley, ringed about by sheer, black cliffs. There were a few trees in some of the courtyards, and the birds used them as meeting-places when they flew out of the rooms and corridors where the...
Throughout the preceding afternoon squads of men had been running up and down the boulevard, dragging with them heavy iron stands to be used as barricades along the curbs. Mang Huat rose from his bed sweaty and itching, having slept very little during the night. Ever since he had been advised tha...