Critics consider Bowles's 1949 novel The Sheltering Sky to be a classic of existential literature and one of the finest novels of the twentieth century.

William Burroughs, who also lived in Tangier for a while, was a friend of Paul Bowles and a leading voice of the Beat movement. Burroughs's novel The Naked Lunch (1959) is a classic of Beat literature.

Michelle Green's The Dream at the End of the World: Paul Bowles and the Literary Renegades in Tangier (1991), is a gossipy chronicle of the expatriate community in Tangier in the 1950s.

Palestinian-American Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) is one of the foundational texts of postcolonial studies. Said critiques Western representations of the East, arguing that Western scholars since the nineteenth century have depicted "Arab" cultures as irrational, anti-Western, primitive, and dishonest.

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), actually written by Gertrude Stein, is...