Book This: Tangier

Where to stay and what to read in Morocco's most intriguing city

“Almost everything in Tangier is unusual. Before coming here, you should…withdraw your savings from the bank, [and] say goodbye to your friends. This advice is quite serious, for it is alarming, the number of travelers who have landed here on a brief holiday, then settled down and let the years go by.” Truman Capote, Vogue, 1950

Tangier. Merely to say the word conjures up treasure-filled casbahs, beatnik cafés, and the wafting fragrance of mint, spices, and hashish across white ziggurat rooftops. This bewitching Moroccan port town, tucked into a crescent-shaped bay on the northwest tip of Africa, is where generations of chic odd birds (Paul and Jane Bowles, Noel Coward, Cecil Beaton, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, William Burroughs, and so many more) have come to lose themselves and then find themselves. Here, an unhurried languor still prevails, eccentricity is a way of life, and time shifts constantly between the blazing sunshine of present-day and the seductive shadowy past.

Even if you’re not planning to visit one day (and you absolutely should!), these three books just might offer a mental escape every bit as enchanting as a real one. My very favorite Tangier-related reads (spoiler, I’m partial to rebellious eccentrics and creative black sheep) are steeped in unbridled decadence, vivid local color and culture, and the very juiciest literary gossip. 

BOOKS //

Let It Come Down by Paul Bowles

Bowles' second novel, Let It Come Down, is set among the "Tangerinas" (the glamorous Tangier elite) and has a fish-out-of-water American protagonist but there are more drugs, more parties, and more corruption than in The Sheltering Sky — think Less Than Zero meets Casablanca. Bowles' spare stylized prose packs a wallop: he doesn't go heavily into description, but with a café called Lucifer, he doesn’t have to: the nihilistic subtext bubbles straight to the surface.