Tangier Memories of Bowles, Genet, and Williams by Mohamed Choukri

Collected for the first time, Mohamed Choukri's Moroccan memories of Paul Bowles, Jean Genet, and Tennessee Williams have just been collected as In Tangier. Born in 1935, Choukri was illiterate until he was twenty, taught himself to read and write, published many novels, and became the chair of Arabic languages at Ibn Batuta College. He gained international attention in 1973 when Bowles translated his short novel For Bread Alone about an impoverished family whose father is driven to violence while the son pursues petty thieving, and, in jail, discovers the power of poetry. The young protagonist agrees to have oral sex with an old man from Spain for fifty pesetas but the gay Arab site Al-bab warns the episode "is described in extremely crude terms obviously calculated to disgust." Tennessee Williams said the novel was "shattering in its impact." As for translations the other way, Choukri was the one to explain to Williams that his play appeared in Arabic as A Cat on the Fire.