The Delicate Prey and Other Stories is a collection of 17 works of short fiction by Paul Bowles, published in 1950 by Random House.Hibbard, 1993 p. 3: Random House "...brought out [the collection] in November, 1950..." Good Reads description

Typical of Bowles's oeuvre, the majority of the stories in this volume are set in Latin America and North Africa. Only two are set in the United States.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. 237

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.Hibbard, 1993 p. 12Hibbard, 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 ." 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".Hibbard, 1993: "...'The Delicate Prey' and 'A Distant Episode, two stories for which Bowles is perhaps best known."

Stories at paso rojo pastor dowe at tacaté call at corazon under the sky señor ong and señor ha the circular valley the echo the scorpion the fourth day out from santa cruz pages from cold point you are not i how many midnights a thousand days to mokhatar tea on the mountain by the water delicate prey a distant episode

Theme and style

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."Hibbard, 1993 p.xii: "Bowles's thematic concerns arise from the experiences of his characters have in these foreign landscapes." 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."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. 237Hibbard, 1993: Bowles: "It seems a practical procedure to let the place determine the characters who will inhabit it." The characters are impelled towards alien and strange territory, both physically and psychologically, challenging their Western cultural assumptions.Hibbard, 1993 p.xiiProse, 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."

Bowles's "unmistakably modern" thematic concerns" are demonstrated by his "depiction of violence and terror."Hibbard, 1993 p.xii 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.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.'" Literary critic Allen Hibbard, though recognizing the "thoroughly pessimistic" themes, traces Bowles's literary style to that of 19th Century authors, such as Flaubert, Turgenev and James: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."

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."Tóibín, 2007

Literary critic Francine Prose observes:

Footnotes

Sources Hibbard, Allen. 1993. Paul Bowles: A Study of the Short Fiction. Twayne Publishers. New York. Prose, Francine. 2002. The Coldest Eye: acting badly among the Arabs. Harper's Magazine. March 2002. https://harpers.org/archive/2002/03/the-coldest-eye/ Retrieved July 10, 2022. Tóibín, Colm. 2007. Avoid the Orient. Review, of Paul Bowles: A Life, by Virginia Spencer Carr. London Review of Books, Vol. 29 No. 1, January 4, 2007. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n01/colm-toibin/avoid-the-orient Retrieved July 11, 2022. Vidal, Gore. 1979. Introduction to Paul Bowles; Collected Stories, 1939-1976. Black Sparrow Press. Santa Rosa. 2001.