Paul Bowles has never fit well into a single category; he is intensely private, preferring to display his life only in art and variously as poet, short-story writer, novelist, translator, journalist, musicologist, and composer (operas, film and theatre scores, and art songs). There was even an early period when he tried being a painter. In the 1930s he was thought of as a composer of theatre music; in the 1940s as music reviewer, journalist and translator, and writer of remarkable short stories; in the 1950s as America's preeminent existential novelist; and in the past two decades as one who has worked with his young Moroccan friends to create, in his English translations, a Moghrebi literature of novels, short stories, and folk tales. His own four novels reflect a multitude of interests, and he conceived of The Sheltering Sky (1949), his most famous novel, as having musical structure. Though his...