Time spent living with her husband José in this transnational region inspired a book of autobiographical “stories” by the Taiwanese writer Sanmao. A linguistics professor visiting this region has his tongue cut out and is made to dance while wearing a costume made of tin cans in the story “A Distant Episode.” This transnational region is the setting of both a 1980 novel by J. M. G. Le Clézio and a travelogue he wrote with his wife Jémia, The Cloud People. The American woman Kit Moresby becomes the concubine of a local in this region after her husband dies of typhoid in Paul Bowles’s novel The Sheltering Sky. The title character is burned on most of his body after his plane crashes in this region in The English Patient. For 10 points, the oral literature of the Berber was spread across what vast desert? ■END■
ANSWER: Sahara Desert [accept Western Sahara; accept Stories of the Sahara; prompt on North Africa or the Maghreb or Morocco or Algeria] (“A Distant Episode” is by Paul Bowles. The Le Clézio novel is Désert. The English Patient is by Michael Ondaatje.)
<TH, World Literature>
= Average correct buzz position