Tangier ― A Literary Guide for Travellers

An edge city, poised at the northernmost tip of Africa, just nine miles across the Strait of Gibraltar from Europe and overlooking both the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, Tangier is more than a destination, it is an escape. The Interzone, as William Burroughs called it, has attracted spies, outlaws, outcasts, and writers for centuries—men and women working out at the edge of literary forms, breaking through artistic borders.

This outlaw originality is what most astonishes when encountering the literary history of Tangier for the first time. Particularly in the past century, the results were some of the most incendiary and influential books of our time, the most prominent being Burroughs' Naked Lunch and Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky. The list of "edge" writers who were drawn to Tangier is long, among them Ibn Battuta, Samuel Pepys, Alexandre Dumas, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Walter Harris, Jean Genet, Paul and Jane Bowles, Tennessee Williams, William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Patricia Highsmith, Jack Kerouac, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, Allen Ginsberg, Alfred Chester, Joe Orton, and Mohamed Choukri.

This is a book that captures the unconventional, multilayered story of literary Tangier and is a must-have for travelers, armchair adventurers, and literature buffs, particularly aficionados of the Beat generation writers and the poets who made the city their home.

Josh Shoemake moved to Morocco in 1996 after graduating from Columbia. He spent three years in Tangier, where he taught literature at the American School of Tangier and formed close friendships with Paul Bowles, Mohamed Choukri, and other local artists and writers. He then served for five years as headmaster of The American School of Marrakesh. He lives in Paris.