Super Bowles

Forty-two years after it was first published, Paul Bowles' novel The Sheltering Sky has hit the best-seller lists. The success of a Vintage paperback issued last spring obviously is due to the film adaptation. But Daniel Halpern, editor of Ecco Press (founded by Bowles and Sky's first publisher), thinks there's more to it. ''It's always been a cult book,'' he says. ''It will survive this and go back to selling 5,000 copies a year, because it's one of the great novels of the mid-century.''