Typical of Bowles's oeuvre, the majority of the stories in this volume are set in Latin American and North Africa. Only two are set in the United States.[3][4][5]
Bowles, at the time of its publication, was known primarily for his work as an American modernist composer. The Delicate Prey and Other Stories established him as a notable literary talent.[6][7][8] The stories published in this collection include a number of chef-d'oeuvres, including "A Distant Episode", "Pages from Cold Point" and "The Delicate Prey".[9]
"What is immediately striking--and particularly characteristic of Bowles's fiction--is the distanced, clinical, quietly confident, and authoritative tone; the rigorously unadorned, quasi-journalistic prose style; the sleek, controlled elegance of his sentences…Bowles's approach to his material and to his characters is relentlessly anthropological, unbiased by either contempt and derision on the one hand or by sympathy and affection on the other…"—Francine Prose, in Harper's Magazine (2002)[10]
"In the stories of The Delicate Prey, 1950, the medium's limitation seems to enhance the basic virtue of Bowles, his tight control of savage and baleful situations, and to foreshorten his main weakness, the inability to conceive and develop characters dramatically."—Ihab Hassan in The Pilgrim as Prey: A Note on Paul Bowles (1954)[11]
One of the unifying features of the stories in this collection are their settings: many of them occur in regions foreign to most Americans, including North Africa and Latin America. From these settings arise Bowles's "thematic concerns."[12] Author Gore Vidal notes that "Landscape is all-important in a Bowles story" and Bowles himself remarked: "It seems a practical procedure to let the place determine the characters who will inhabit it."[13][14] The characters are impelled towards alien and strange territory, both physically and psychologically, challenging their Western cultural assumptions.[15][16]
Bowles's "unmistakably modern" thematic concerns" are demonstrated by his "depiction of violence and terror."[17] The violent episodes that appear in the stories of this collection have been widely remarked upon, as well as the style in which they are rendered.[18][19][20] Literary critic Allen Hibbard, though recognizing the "thorougly pessimistic" themes, traces Bowles's literary style to that of 19th Century authors, such as Flaubert, Turgenev and James:[21]
Transgressive acts, as shocking as they may be, are contained within traditionally crafted forms. Generally, the Bowles' story is told in a fairly straightforward, linear manner [which] supports no moral comment on the actions that take place.[22]
Bowles, commenting on his own style: "I don't try to analyze the emotions of any of my characters. I don't give them emotions. You can explain a thought but not an emotion. You can't use emotions. There's nothing you can do with them."[23]
Bowles's fiction is the last place to which one would go for hope, or even for faint reassurance that the world is anything but a senseless horror show…It would be hard to think of another writer so unmoved and uninterested in the traditional values and virtues that we associate with Western humanism (compassion, generosity, empathy), just as it's difficult to find one genuinely heroic character or act of heroism, selflessness, or sacrifice in Bowles's oeuvre.[24]
Footnotes
↑ Hibbard, 1993 p. 3: Random House "...brought out [the collection] in November, 1950..."
↑ Hibbard, 1993 p. 3, And p.xi: "One of the most distinguishing features of Bowles's fiction is his use of foreign settings."
↑ Vidal, 1979: "The stories fall into rough categories…Mexico and North Africa are the principal settings. Landscape is all-important in a Bowles story."
↑ Hibbard, 1993 p.ix: Vidal: "His stories are among the best ever written by an American…as a short story writer, he has few equals in the second half of the twentieth century."
↑ Hibbard, 1993: The collection "established a range of themes…helped secure Bowles's literary reputation. These early works were responsible for creating in large part the image most readers and critics have of the author today [1993]."
↑ Hibbard, 1993: "...'The Delicate Prey' and 'A Distant Episode, two stories for which Bowles is perhaps best known."
↑ Hibbard, 1993 219: Hassen quote originally in The Western Review, 19 (1954): 23-36
↑ Hibbard, 1993 p.xii: "Bowles's thematic concerns arise from the experiences of his characters have in these foreign landscapes."
↑ Hibbard, 1993 p.xi: "One of the most distinguishing features of Bowles's fiction is his use of foreign settings."
↑ Vidal, 1979: "The stories fall into rough categories. First, locale. Mexico and North Africa are the principal settings. Landscape is all-important in a Bowles story. Hibbard, 1993 p. 237 Hibbard, 1993: Bowles: "It seems a practical procedure to let the place determine the characters who will inhabit it."
↑ Prose, 2002: "Paul Bowles's obsessive subject is the tragic, even fatal mistakes that Westerners so commonly make in their misguided and often presumptuous encounters with the mysteries of a foreign culture."
↑ Hibbard, 1993 p.xii: "A sense of terror to which he subjects his characters and readers." And p. 239: Joyce Carol Oates: "...a horror far more persuasive than anything in Edgar Allan Poe."
↑ Tóibín, 2007: Tennessee Williams: "It wasn't the Arabs I was afraid of while I was in Tangier; it was Paul Bowles, whose chilling stories filled me with horror.
↑ Vidal, 1979: "...a sense of strangeness and terror…" in 'The Delicate Prey' and 'A Distant Episode.'"
↑ Tóibín, 2007: On the passage in which the professor's tongue is cut out in "A Distant Episode': "The passage has all the hallmarks of Bowles. It is clearly written, coldly imagined, cruel and sensual at the same time."
↑ Hibbard, 1993 p.xiii: "The teller's presense is intensely felt, yet at the same time he is distant, coy, cold, or simply out of reach."
Paul Frederic Bowles was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. He became associated with the Moroccan city of Tangier, where he settled in 1947 and lived for 52 years to the end of his life.
"A Distant Episode" is a short story by Paul Bowles. Written in 1945, it was first published in the Partisan Review and republished in New Directions in Prose and Poetry, #10 in 1948. It is also the title piece in a 1988 collection of Bowles's short stories, A Distant Episode: Selected Stories by Ecco Press.
Up Above the World is a novel by Paul Bowles first published in 1966 by Simon and Schuster and in Great Britain by Peter Owen Publishers in 1967. Up Above the World was the last of Bowles’s four novels.
Allal is a short story by Paul Bowles written in Tangiers in 1976 and first published in the January 27, 1977, issue of Rolling Stone. It appeared in his short fiction collection Things Gone and Things Still Here (1977) published by Black Sparrow Press.
"The Delicate Prey" is a piece of short fiction by Paul Bowles. It was written in 1949 and first published in Paris in the summer 1949 issue of the small literary journal Zero. In 1950, Random House presented the story in the collection of Bowles's short fiction, The Delicate Prey and Other Stories. This short story is considered one of Bowles' most outstanding and controversial works of fiction.
"Tapiama" is a short story by Paul Bowles. It was first published in May 1958 by John Lehmann in The London Magazine. It later appeared in the collection of his short fiction, The Hours After Noon, published by the Heinemann in 1959. The story was subsequently published in A Distant Episode: The Selected Stories by Ecco Press in 1988.
"Pages from Cold Point" is a short story by Paul Bowles. It was first published in the Autumn 1949 issue of Wake: The Creative Magazine. It was republished in New Directions in Prose and Poetry #11. It later appeared in a collection of his short fiction, The Delicate Prey and Other Stories, published by Random House in 1950. Bowles wrote the story in 1947 while aboard the MS Ferncape en route to Casablanca from New York.
"The Echo" is a short story by Paul Bowles written in 1946 and first published in the September 1946 issue of Harper's Bazaar magazine. It was later published in a collection of his short fiction, The Delicate Prey and Other Stories, published by Random House in 1950.
"You Are Not I" is a short story by Paul Bowles written in 1948 and first published in the January 1948 issue of Mademoiselle magazine. It later appeared in the collection of his short fiction, The Delicate Prey and Other Stories (1950), published by Random House.
"At Paso Rojo" is a short story by Paul Bowles, written in 1947 and first published in the September 1948 issue of Mademoiselle magazine. It later appeared in a collection of his short fiction, The Delicate Prey and Other Stories (1950), published by Random House.
The Spider’s House is a novel by Paul Bowles and first published by Random House in 1955.
The Time of Friendship is a collection of 13 works of short fiction by Paul Bowles published in 1967 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. A number of the stories included in this volume appeared earlier "in various places during the 1950s and 1960s."
A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard is a collection of short fiction by Paul Bowles published by City Lights Books in 1962. The volume was the first collection of his works published in the United States since The Delicate Prey and Other Stories (1950).
"Tea on the Mountain" is a short story by Paul Bowles. Written in 1939, the story first appeared in the 1950 collection The Delicate Prey and Other Stories published by Random House. In the United Kingdom, it was published under the title "A Spring Day" in the collection A Little Stone.
"The Hours After Noon" is a short story by Paul Bowles. It was first published in 1956 in Zero Anthology of Literature and Art #8, ed. Themistocles Hoetis. It later appeared in his collection of short fiction, The Time of Friendship (1967), published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
The Hyena is a short story by Paul Bowles. It was first published in Transatlantic Review #11. It was later included in his short fiction collection The Time of Friendship (1967) published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
"Doña Faustina" is a short story by Paul Bowles written in 1949 and first published in the New Directions #12 anthology in 1950. The work is included in his collections of short fiction The Hours After Noon and The Time of Friendship. Written while Bowles was living in Tangiers, "Doña Faustina" is among several works in the collection that exhibit "a maturation of style and a realization of greater complexity" in his literary talents.
Things Gone and Things Still Here is a collection of nine works of short fiction by Paul Bowles, published in 1977 by Black Sparrow Press. The volume is the sixth collection of Bowles’s work, much of which is re-published material.
"You Have Left Your Lotus Pods on the Bus" is a short story by Paul Bowles written in Tangiers in 1971 and first published in his short fiction collection Things Gone and Things Still Here (1977) by Black Sparrow Press.
Midnight Mass is a collection of 12 works of short fiction by Paul Bowles, published in 1981 by Black Sparrow Press. The volume is the fifth collection of Bowles’s work, much of which is re-published material.
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