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Library of America #135
Collected Stories & Later Writings
“The Library of America has made it easier for readers to enjoy Bowles’s exotic literary harvest.” — The Columbus Dispatch
Paul Bowles was a composer, writer, and an American expatriate who spent most of the last five decades of his life in Tangier. According The Boston Globe , he was “one of the literary class acts of the twentieth century.” This Library of America volume, containing his stories and travel writings, is one of two volumes in the first annotated edition of Paul Bowles’s work and is a “treasure trove for readers who haven’t explored beyond The Sheltering Sky ” ( The Seattle Times ).
“All the tales are a variety of detective story,” wrote Bowles of his first collection, The Delicate Prey and Other Stories (1950), “in which the reader is the detective; the mystery is the motivation for the characters’ behavior.” In such stories as “A Distant Episode” and “How Many Midnights,” Bowles pushes human character beyond socially defined limits and maps a transformed (often horribly transformed) reality.
A master of gothic terror and an acute and at times diabolically funny observer of manners and motives both American and Moroccan, Bowles confirmed his mastery of the short story in such volumes as A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard (1962), The Time of Friendship (1967), Things Gone and Things Still Here (1977), and Midnight Mass (1981), all included here along with a selection of his final stories.
This volume also contains Up Above the World (1966), a frightening novella set in Latin America in which a trusting American couple are lured into an annihilating trap, and the informed and fascinating travel book Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue (1963).
LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
Paul Bowles was a composer, writer, and an American expatriate who spent most of the last five decades of his life in Tangier. According The Boston Globe , he was “one of the literary class acts of the twentieth century.” This Library of America volume, containing his stories and travel writings, is one of two volumes in the first annotated edition of Paul Bowles’s work and is a “treasure trove for readers who haven’t explored beyond The Sheltering Sky ” ( The Seattle Times ).
“All the tales are a variety of detective story,” wrote Bowles of his first collection, The Delicate Prey and Other Stories (1950), “in which the reader is the detective; the mystery is the motivation for the characters’ behavior.” In such stories as “A Distant Episode” and “How Many Midnights,” Bowles pushes human character beyond socially defined limits and maps a transformed (often horribly transformed) reality.
A master of gothic terror and an acute and at times diabolically funny observer of manners and motives both American and Moroccan, Bowles confirmed his mastery of the short story in such volumes as A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard (1962), The Time of Friendship (1967), Things Gone and Things Still Here (1977), and Midnight Mass (1981), all included here along with a selection of his final stories.
This volume also contains Up Above the World (1966), a frightening novella set in Latin America in which a trusting American couple are lured into an annihilating trap, and the informed and fascinating travel book Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue (1963).
LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
1050 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1979
About the author
Paul Bowles
257 books905 followersPaul Frederic Bowles grew up in New York, and attended college at the University of Virginia before traveling to Paris, where became a part of Gertrude Stein's literary and artistic circle. Following her advice, he took his first trip to Tangiers in 1931 with his friend, composer Aaron Copeland.
In 1938 he married author and playwright Jane Auer (see: Jane Bowles). He moved to Tangiers permanently in 1947, with Auer following him there in 1948. There they became fixtures of the American and European expatriate scene, their visitors including Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal. Bowles continued to live in Tangiers after the death of his wife in 1973.
Bowles died of heart failure in Tangier on November 18, 1999. His ashes were interred near the graves of his parents and grandparents in Lakemont, New York.
In 1938 he married author and playwright Jane Auer (see: Jane Bowles). He moved to Tangiers permanently in 1947, with Auer following him there in 1948. There they became fixtures of the American and European expatriate scene, their visitors including Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal. Bowles continued to live in Tangiers after the death of his wife in 1973.
Bowles died of heart failure in Tangier on November 18, 1999. His ashes were interred near the graves of his parents and grandparents in Lakemont, New York.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
July 27, 2018
Immediately when you arrive in the Sahara, for the first or the tenth time, you notice the stillness. An incredible, absolute silence prevails outside the towns; and within, even in busy places like the markets, there is a hushed quality in the air, as if the quiet were a conscious force which, resenting the intrusion of sound, minimizes and disperses sound straightway. Then there is the sky, compared to which all other skies seem faint-hearted efforts. Solid and luminous, it is always the focal point of the landscape. At sunset, the precise, curved shadow of the earth rises into it swiftly from the horizon, cutting it into light section and dark section. When all daylight is gone, and the space is thick with stars, it is still of an intense and burning blue, darkest directly overhead and paling toward the earth, so that the night never really grows dark.
You leave the gate of the fort or the town behind, pass the camels lying outside, go up into the dunes, or out onto the hard, stony plain and stand awhile, alone. Presently, you will either shiver and hurry back inside the walls, or you will go on standing there and let something very peculiar happen to you, something that everyone who lives there has undergone and which the French call le bapteme de la solitude. It is a unique sensation, and it has nothing to do with loneliness, for loneliness presupposes memory. Here, in this wholly mineral landscape lighted by stars like flares, even memory disappears; nothing is left but your own breathing and the sound of your heart beating. A strange, and by no means pleasant, process of reintegration begins inside you, and you have the choice of fighting against it, and insisting on remaining the person you have always been, or letting it take its course. For no one who has stayed in the Sahara for a while is quite the same as when he came.
You leave the gate of the fort or the town behind, pass the camels lying outside, go up into the dunes, or out onto the hard, stony plain and stand awhile, alone. Presently, you will either shiver and hurry back inside the walls, or you will go on standing there and let something very peculiar happen to you, something that everyone who lives there has undergone and which the French call le bapteme de la solitude. It is a unique sensation, and it has nothing to do with loneliness, for loneliness presupposes memory. Here, in this wholly mineral landscape lighted by stars like flares, even memory disappears; nothing is left but your own breathing and the sound of your heart beating. A strange, and by no means pleasant, process of reintegration begins inside you, and you have the choice of fighting against it, and insisting on remaining the person you have always been, or letting it take its course. For no one who has stayed in the Sahara for a while is quite the same as when he came.
November 12, 2016
Simply reading Bowles' biography at the end of this collection is enough to leave one awestruck. World traveler, composer, novelist, travel essayist, translator, musicologist all the time hobnobbing with the who's who of culture and arts from the 20th century. A rich life, well led.
As for this collection, everything would rate from good to very good to excellent. He's a very straightforward storyteller. Some of the stories are quite dark and a few are borderline profane for the times they were written. There are too many that I truly loved to list. There are only a handful of stories (and the included novel) where maybe he didn't quite get all he wanted, or maybe left an abrupt ending. The endnotes suggest that he did some, but not much editing. Nothing in this collection would rate poorly by any stretch. Less committed readers could read the collections separately.
I especially liked his travel essay of when he was field recording traditional Moroccan music in the late 1950s. The music is available on cd.
One of our great cultural icons, and don't forget his masterpiece The Sheltering Sky.
As for this collection, everything would rate from good to very good to excellent. He's a very straightforward storyteller. Some of the stories are quite dark and a few are borderline profane for the times they were written. There are too many that I truly loved to list. There are only a handful of stories (and the included novel) where maybe he didn't quite get all he wanted, or maybe left an abrupt ending. The endnotes suggest that he did some, but not much editing. Nothing in this collection would rate poorly by any stretch. Less committed readers could read the collections separately.
I especially liked his travel essay of when he was field recording traditional Moroccan music in the late 1950s. The music is available on cd.
One of our great cultural icons, and don't forget his masterpiece The Sheltering Sky.
July 29, 2008
Paul Bowles is unsympathetic to his characters. He pricks them, burns them, cuts them, and leaves for dead, usually offering no explanation why. Perhaps it's because man is sometimes mostly animal.
Deliciously deviant.
Deliciously deviant.
June 11, 2026
A strange thing kept happening to me when I sat down to read Paul Bowles’ work.
I began reading his biographical notes in the last several pages of the book and was absolutely floored; he was quite the composer and his personal life—his wife took a female lover for a time and they lived apart but in the same building—was fascinating as well. He rubbed elbows with peers in the Lost Generation and lived abroad like a true expat with fire in his gut and a lust for life, dying at a ripe old age.
However, the strange thing that kept happening to me as I tore into “The Delicate Prey and Other Stories” was that I kept dozing off! I could not focus my attention on these dull stories with one spike of a climax that quickly ended after a bit of shock value. It seems like he designed each tale to follow a formula:
1. Inundate the reader with details about the setting or characters moving about in some scene to the point of exhaustion.
2. Drop the reader in the midst of something. Not the beginning, really, but an ongoing tale that you’re catching up to (a great narrative device in itself when used with heightened tension) after you’re already considering quitting the story.
3. Throw in a bunch of boring details and pretend it builds tension (and have critics like Norman Mailer say that one of your stories is the best story ever written even though we’ve all heard that about tons of stories—I just read that Joyce’s “The Dead” was considered “the best story in the English language,” blah blah blah).
4. Immediately change the tone and introduce something shocking (e.g., the mutilation of our boy in “The Delicate Prey.” Who saw that coming?! And in 1950 to boot…) without batting an eye in the diction. Everything is treated as normal and unsurprising despite horrendous acts occurring by morally reprehensible characters. Bowles suffers from a negative Orientalist bias as he paints non-whites with a psychotic, dehumanized brush.
5. End with anticlimactic ambivalence and/or vengeance of some kind (e.g., the above-mentioned story or “Pastor Dowe at Tacate” or “A Distant Episode”).
Wash, rinse, repeat. His “mythical” stories, like “The Scorpion,” are also bland. Great, she came out of the cave and the scorpion is symbolic and she’s figuratively swallowing her fear in a dream…it’s still just a woman coming out of a cave. I appreciate what he was trying to do but this story suffers from an attempt at symbolic obscurantism that achieves only cliche and pretentiousness.
If you want to say you’ve read Paul Bowles, push through The Delicate Prey, A Distant Episode, and Pages from Cold Point. This last one has been lauded as a masterpiece of literature in disciplines like Queer Studies. I was hoping it would be as revolutionary as others claimed, but really, the vignette that is supposed to reference father-son incest is open to interpretation in my book. Granted, the uncle does warn the father in the beginning about a previous incident not occurring again, but in the story, when the boy is nude in bed, the father seems to fear him and does not touch him. He seems relieved to be rid of him in the resolution.
To me, there is a lot of assumption taking place by scholars engaging in this text and I see a fathers’ exasperation with a homosexual son with whom he may have introduced to sex too early and it is now the boy’s sole obsession. Or it’s a statement about the perceived deviousness of homosexuals in the 40’s; a caricature of a nymphomaniac trying to seduce his father following the death of his mother and acting out the seduction with other men around the village (a reverse Oedipal
Complex). Or perhaps his father did molest him at one time—justifying the reference from the uncle—and it altered the boy’s disposition toward obsessive sexual fixation?
I haven’t read anything about what Bowles had to say about this particular story or if he ever verified that the critics are correct. I feel like I should but I don’t want to spend anymore time with Bowles at this point. If someone else would like to enlighten me and close the proverbial book on whether he really is implying an incestuous relationship with his son—as opposed to his son merely being promiscuous to the point of seducing the father—please do so!
I began reading his biographical notes in the last several pages of the book and was absolutely floored; he was quite the composer and his personal life—his wife took a female lover for a time and they lived apart but in the same building—was fascinating as well. He rubbed elbows with peers in the Lost Generation and lived abroad like a true expat with fire in his gut and a lust for life, dying at a ripe old age.
However, the strange thing that kept happening to me as I tore into “The Delicate Prey and Other Stories” was that I kept dozing off! I could not focus my attention on these dull stories with one spike of a climax that quickly ended after a bit of shock value. It seems like he designed each tale to follow a formula:
1. Inundate the reader with details about the setting or characters moving about in some scene to the point of exhaustion.
2. Drop the reader in the midst of something. Not the beginning, really, but an ongoing tale that you’re catching up to (a great narrative device in itself when used with heightened tension) after you’re already considering quitting the story.
3. Throw in a bunch of boring details and pretend it builds tension (and have critics like Norman Mailer say that one of your stories is the best story ever written even though we’ve all heard that about tons of stories—I just read that Joyce’s “The Dead” was considered “the best story in the English language,” blah blah blah).
4. Immediately change the tone and introduce something shocking (e.g., the mutilation of our boy in “The Delicate Prey.” Who saw that coming?! And in 1950 to boot…) without batting an eye in the diction. Everything is treated as normal and unsurprising despite horrendous acts occurring by morally reprehensible characters. Bowles suffers from a negative Orientalist bias as he paints non-whites with a psychotic, dehumanized brush.
5. End with anticlimactic ambivalence and/or vengeance of some kind (e.g., the above-mentioned story or “Pastor Dowe at Tacate” or “A Distant Episode”).
Wash, rinse, repeat. His “mythical” stories, like “The Scorpion,” are also bland. Great, she came out of the cave and the scorpion is symbolic and she’s figuratively swallowing her fear in a dream…it’s still just a woman coming out of a cave. I appreciate what he was trying to do but this story suffers from an attempt at symbolic obscurantism that achieves only cliche and pretentiousness.
If you want to say you’ve read Paul Bowles, push through The Delicate Prey, A Distant Episode, and Pages from Cold Point. This last one has been lauded as a masterpiece of literature in disciplines like Queer Studies. I was hoping it would be as revolutionary as others claimed, but really, the vignette that is supposed to reference father-son incest is open to interpretation in my book. Granted, the uncle does warn the father in the beginning about a previous incident not occurring again, but in the story, when the boy is nude in bed, the father seems to fear him and does not touch him. He seems relieved to be rid of him in the resolution.
To me, there is a lot of assumption taking place by scholars engaging in this text and I see a fathers’ exasperation with a homosexual son with whom he may have introduced to sex too early and it is now the boy’s sole obsession. Or it’s a statement about the perceived deviousness of homosexuals in the 40’s; a caricature of a nymphomaniac trying to seduce his father following the death of his mother and acting out the seduction with other men around the village (a reverse Oedipal
Complex). Or perhaps his father did molest him at one time—justifying the reference from the uncle—and it altered the boy’s disposition toward obsessive sexual fixation?
I haven’t read anything about what Bowles had to say about this particular story or if he ever verified that the critics are correct. I feel like I should but I don’t want to spend anymore time with Bowles at this point. If someone else would like to enlighten me and close the proverbial book on whether he really is implying an incestuous relationship with his son—as opposed to his son merely being promiscuous to the point of seducing the father—please do so!
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 22, 2025
Very dark. Ethereal prose. Endings that hang. A wonderful emotional read, a very deep undercurrent in very tight prose. Very enjoyable.
Want to Read
July 29, 2025Here is a link for In the Red Room by Bowles, Paul: https://www.classicshorts.com/stories...
Want to Read
January 29, 2013"A Delicate Prey" and "A Distant Episodes" are superb, but they are hardly the exception. THese stories (which take place in Latin America, or alternatively North Africa are dark and cynical. The prose is razor precise, the underlying philosophy of these works extend the Heidegger metaphysical ontology and speak of the follies and repercussions of cultural misunderstanding. In "A Distant Episode", the reader should pay careful attention to the theme of language in light of a Professor's ill-fated (aren't they all!?) "understanding" of the people of the Maghreb. Additionally, "A Delicate Prey", a story set in Latin America, leaves so much to the reader that i've read it three times with different conclusions! Love this guy!
July 21, 2012
See my reviews of the individual volumes included in this compilation. Note that _One Hundred Camels in the Courtyard_ was a limited edition collection published by City Lights, and was later incorporated into the American publication of _Time of Friendship_; my review of _Camels_ is included, generally, in the review for that book.
A note on the uncollected later stories: These are quite impressive and Bowles's best work, in my opinion. He was experimenting with formal elements of fiction as well as putting an ironic reflection of himself as a character in certain of the stories (particularly the epistolary stories). I consider "Too Far from Home" to be his best story.
A note on the uncollected later stories: These are quite impressive and Bowles's best work, in my opinion. He was experimenting with formal elements of fiction as well as putting an ironic reflection of himself as a character in certain of the stories (particularly the epistolary stories). I consider "Too Far from Home" to be his best story.
October 3, 2020
Nobody has really come out to say that this American ex-patriot who spent fifty years of his life living in Morocco, wrote some terrifying and ultra-violent fictions. If you thought The Sheltering Sky was terrifying at times, seek out these stories about strangers going into strange places and being kidnapped or castrated and murdered. Or people held as slaves for the rest of their lives, or wondering the desert, as if cursed to roam eternally through hell. Stories like “The Delicate Prey” or “A Distant Episode”. His vivid language and explicit violence further accentuate the fears and horrors experienced by individuals in these short but poetic stories.
May 25, 2015
Extraordinary collection of stories -- all are wonderful and terrible -- but the story Allal stands out as one of the most masterful descriptions in the English language of altered consciousness -- when the mind of a human being enters the body of a snake -- and vice versa -- by mistake under the effects of kif. A must read for anyone interested in modernist fiction techniques.
July 29, 2012
Every story is a piece of art in its own right, but there are a few that make this collection invaluable - The Delicate Prey; A Distant Episode; In the Red Room; Monologue, Tangier 1975; Monologue, Massachusetts 1932; Too Far From Home. Not only do you feel the mysteriousness of Morocco or Sri Lanka, and of the places in between, but also the solitude and desolateness of the human soul.
September 30, 2015
Paul Bowles wrote some fantastic short stories, travelogues, and a creepy short novel, UP ABOVE THE WORLD (all included here). No writer I have read does more about the cruelty of man than Bowles. The Library of America deserve a big 'thank you' for making this superb volume available.
Read
October 2, 2012Awesome.
March 21, 2026
Fantastic collection with an excellent glossary and useful notes.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews