Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Paul Bowles

Their Heads are Green and Their Hands are Blue by Paul Bowles

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“Each time I go to a place I have not seen before, I hope it will be as different as possible from the places I already know.”   There’s a race against time in the packaging of this book to be the first to mention Edward Said. In Orientalism, Said frames the way we should look at colonial, Orientalist, and imperial writings, and really ask the key questions. Who gets to talk? What do they say? Who do they say it about? Etc. Said was an […]

Paul Bowles is such an interesting character

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This collection of stories is the earliest one from Paul Bowles I could find. He was a renowned composer (friend and colleague of Aaron Copland for example) and just up and decided to write a handful of novels and a lot of stories. These stories kind of take place all over the place, from North Africa to Mexico and Central America, as well as a few nameless places. He, in a way, almost writes anti-Hemingway short stories. These aren’t the stories of masculine men revealing […]

There’s something repulsive about an American without money in his pocket.

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I have now in the last few weeks read a novel by a British author that takes place in a North African colony, an Egyptian novel that takes place during British colonial rule, and now an American novel that takes place in French North Africa in the 1940s. There’s not really a consistent narrative thread or theme going along through all these, but some patterns have developed. For one, in each novel, there’s a Western presence seen in each novel as a vulgar/profane inhabitant of […]



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