Despite Paul Bowles's legendary reclusiveness, he has always been an indefatigable correspondent, and this marvellous collection of his letters, spanning eight decades, provides a unique insight into the many aspects of his brilliant and diverse career - as composer, novelist, travel writer, translator, ethnographer and critic.

From his earliest surviving letter, written at the age of four, to his precocious teenage effusions to Gertrude Stein, from his meditations on the effects of mescaline to his intensely moving letters to his wife Jane during her last illness, 'In Touch' fills in the gaps left by previous biographers and by Bowles's autobiography 'Without Stopping' (so notoriously unrevealing that William Burroughs nicknamed it 'Without Telling').

Here is Paul Bowles on the genesis of his novels; on his dogged expeditions attempting to record Moroccan tribal music; on the Beats, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams; on the nature and craft of writing; on appearing as an elderly extra in Bernardo Bertolucci's film of 'The Sheltering Sky'. Among many others, his correspondents include William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Henry Miller. Gossipy, reflective, surprising, enlightening and always entertaining, 'In Touch' is an epistolary autobiography by one of the greatest, and most private, writers of our time, and a remarkable portrait of the twentieth century avant-garde, from Tristan Tzara to David Byrne.