"Here's My Message. Everything Gets Worse."

THE SHELTERING SKY

By Paul Bowles

(1949)

Inscribed first US edition of Bowles's first novel, the grim and enduring twentieth-century classic of alienated Americans wandering through North Africa towards destruction.

Very good plus in very good jacket.

Price: $3,500.00

THE SHELTERING SKY

Bowles's masterpiece, often praised as pitiless and dazzling, like the sun — beautiful, but not good for the eyes — was written in several Algerian hotel bedrooms over a period of nine months. "My idea was that the people would keep moving into the desert," he explained to Jay McInerney, "that one would get ill and die, and at that point it would write itself." Once completed, Bowles sent the book to Doubleday, who didn't want it: "They said, 'We asked for a novel.' They didn't consider it a novel." New Directions was happy to publish it for "a postwar reading public that was still shockable" (Theroux), and as a reading public loves to be shocked, it became a bestseller.

Read more: McInerney, "Paul Bowles in Exile," Vanity Fair; Theroux, Figures in a Landscape: People and Places.

The Object

First printing. (New York): New Directions, (1949). 8'' x 5.25''. Original tan cloth. In original unclipped ($2.75) dust jacket by Alvin Lustig. 318 pages. Inscribed by Bowles on half title. Minor edgewear to boards, faint soil to edges of text block. Jacket with a couple nicks and a few small closed tears, some soil to rear panel, spine toned.

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