Product Description

Exemplary storles that reveal the blzarre, the dlsturblng, the perllous, and the wlse ln other clvlllzatlons -- from one of Amerlca's most lmportant wrlters of the twentleth century.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1234172 in Books
• Published on: 2006-06-29
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

From Amazon.com
Paul Bowles once said that a story should remain taut throughout, like a piece of string. That tense, stretched tone is the key to this collection of 17 eerie tales by the author best known for The Sheltering Sky. The Delicate Prey is dedicated: "For my mother, who first read me the stories of Poe." If Poe had lived in Mexico, and he'd had ice water running in his veins to counteract his feverish romanticism, he might have crafted something like these odd vignettes about human frailty and cruelty. The setting is a world where palm trees are like "shiny green spiders," where bats reel silently overhead in a jet-black sky, where a hot, relentless wind blows across deserted plazas.

As Tobias Wolff writes in Esquire, "The Delicate Prey is in fact one of the most profound, beautifully wrought, and haunting collections in our literature.... Bowles's tales are at once austere, witty, violent, and sensuous. They move with the inevitability of myth. His language has a purity of line, a poise and authority entirely its own, capable of instantly modulating from farce to horror without a ruffle."

About the Author

Paul Bowles was born in New York City in 1910. He studied music with composer Aaron Copland before moving to Tangier, Morocco, with his wife, Jane. Bowles is the author of numerous books, most notably The Sheltering Sky.

Customer Reviews

Outside Civilizations Walls
"Delicate Prey", the title story, is one of the most memorable stories I've ever encountered. This story of a young flute player and his uncles who are Arab traders crossing a remote desert region begins innocently enough but soon a stranger appears on the horizon who comes closer and closer. This desert episode is told with a perfect accumulation of atmospheric detail and just the barest amount of human detail to place this tale in the realm of myth. The tale involves many things that will later appear in Bowles' other short fictions including hashish and flute music and other things that will go unmentioned so as not to spoil their discovery by new readers. "At Paso Rojo" is a story set in South America on a ranch. There two sisters go after their mothers death to live with their brother. As the sisters settle in one sister especially decides she wants to live a freer life than women in the cities are allowed to live and she begins to allow herself liberties that shock her more conservative sister. As she rides through the wild jungle her horse bolts and the sensations she has impart to the reader that hers is no ordinary psychology. Used to suppressing her sexuality while her mother was alive she begins to explore her power as a woman and as events unfold we see that this power has sprouted something in her that cannot be mistaken for anything but pure evil. Every story in this collection presents striking locales and lurid acts. The appeal of them is partly in the exoticism of the locales and partly in the allure of the lurid. Bowles aesthetic is a strange one but his tales could not be delivered with any more force. The collection is dedicated to Poe, and appropriately so, but the depth of the psychological examination of different kinds of pathologies lend these stories a power that magnifies their effect beyond mere horror stories. They are stories of modern psyches with the superficial but protective veneer of civilization removed.

Strange, morbid and fascinating
Not everyone will enjoy thse weird stories mostly set in Mexico or Morocco. They contain violence and, in a way, sex, although sex is never explicitly described. They almost always end in disaster, sometimes grotesque and cruel disaster. The sexual element is never quite straight heterosexual attraction between consenting adults. A frequent plot is that someone is invited somewhere by a host who becomes hostile or takes a journey following an unreliable guide that ends badly. Think DH Lawrence, Joyce Carol Oates, Roald Dahl, Truman Capote and, as regards the prose style. maybe even Raymond Carver He is a minimalist with a way of bringing an exotic setting to life in half a sentence without an adjective or adverb. A remarkable thing is how long ago the stories were written and how modern the style seems.

A Stunning Collection!
This is a must-read for anyone interested in 20th century American literature. An absolutely stunning collection of tales that provoke, disturb and intoxicate the reader. Bowles writes in a style that is almost clinical: dry, precise and elegant, which accentuates the horrors he describes all the more. Hailed by such writers and Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer as a modern classic, you should not fail to read it if you have not already done so. And if enjoyed this title, check out The Sheltering Sky and Let it Come Down.