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Thirteen stories written in the five years between 1976 and 1981, "Midnight Mass" picks up where Bowles' Collected Stories left off, and includes the wonderful novella-length "Here to Learn", concerning a young Moroccan woman 'adopted' by various affluent Europeans.
260 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1981
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288 people want to read
About the author
Paul Bowles
252 books869 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 - 22 of 22 reviews
December 20, 2025
When you read Midnight Mass, one recurring emotion keeps surfacing: in this world, almost everyone is a stranger. Bowles writes about Tangier and its surroundings in such a way that the dividing line does not run between European and Muslim, but between the individual and a space that fully accepts no one. In the stories about expatriates, you feel their confused attempts to gain a foothold in a country that does not belong to them. In the stories about Muslim families, there is the same sense of alienation, only from within: the characters lose their bearings inside their own homes, customs, and fears, as if reality itself were constantly slipping out from under their feet.
Parables like The Hyena add yet another layer: here it is the reader who becomes the outsider, because the rules of narration are different, non-Western, and Bowles makes no effort to explain them.
Taken together, these stories produce a strange sensation: no one in them is the master of the territory. People, traditions, houses, even animals — all seem to exist on a kind of borderland, where order exists, but not for you. And it is precisely this fundamental sense of non-belonging that gives the collection its coherence: Bowles depicts a world in which everyone navigates blindly, and this is the norm.
Parables like The Hyena add yet another layer: here it is the reader who becomes the outsider, because the rules of narration are different, non-Western, and Bowles makes no effort to explain them.
Taken together, these stories produce a strange sensation: no one in them is the master of the territory. People, traditions, houses, even animals — all seem to exist on a kind of borderland, where order exists, but not for you. And it is precisely this fundamental sense of non-belonging that gives the collection its coherence: Bowles depicts a world in which everyone navigates blindly, and this is the norm.
March 9, 2019
Midnight Mass is a wonderfully refreshing collections of short stories. Of the twelve stories, ten are set in Morocco, where Bowles settled and lived for 52 years. The stories reflect on the culture, characteristics, and beliefs of the people. They show, through clear and concise narrative, the juxtaposition of ‘old’ thinking against the new. This is most prominent in medicine, where the older generation or the uneducated succumb to ancient remedies based mainly on religious dogma rather than on modern medicine. A few stories exhibit this theme:
What is particularly catching in ‘The Empty Amulet’ is that Habiba’s husband, Moumen, is a practicing student of medicine, but because of her lack of education (thanks to her father), she holds on to the traditional methods of healings from religious figures. What Bowles has done is to offer two extreme polarities in one couple and prove the weakness of the old method versus the new, without explicitly passing judgment. Suffice it to say, Moumen offer her an amulet said to contain baraka, religious blessings from a fqih, and her symptoms and pains subside. Habiba lives happily and gives birth to a healthy child, until one day she accidentally steps on the amulet and discovers it contains blank papers. The irony of the placebo effect is not lost here. Naturally, her symptoms return.
In the longest of these stories ‘Here to Learn’ we journey with fifteen-year-old Malika who runs away from home, hurt by her mother’s harshness, and we witness a modest, innocent child become a woman traveling the world in the company of western men. In this modern fairy tale-cum-fable, the effects of money and revelry consume the illiterate and poor Malika, who wants to prove her ‘worth’ to her mother. But her decency and redeeming quality remain in her desire to become literate. By-the-by when she eventually returns back home to Tangier, she is faced with tragedy. The prose is engaging and vivid, and the absurd pace and wildness of the adventure – from one locale to another – reminded me several times of Voltaire’s Candide:
Perhaps most poignant in some of the stories is the presence of ‘otherness,’ all those expats or visitors in comparison to the natives and their customs. These stark differences in culture help ground us in what is unique and special about what we are witnessing, they also remind us of how easy it is to feel above others through status or ego; yet for all the simplicity of the natives, they have survived and flourished in their land before the foreigners arrived with their ideas, monies, and dogmas. An experience much of the world has known at the expense of a few colonizing powers. But it is hard to not judge, to not criticize, or to not look down on another, at least more so in the 60s.
In ‘The Dismissal’ Abdelkarim is forced to go into hiding after accidentally witnessing a crime on his specially requested free day from work. He runs away but then looks back and recognizes one of the criminals, and he is recognized in return. So, to spare himself and possibly his employers, he leaves the job without notice and goes into hiding for two months, until he finally hears that the criminals were captured on that same day. Knowing he is safe, he returns to Tangier and straight to Patricia’s house, only to be told by the maid Patricia would not see him, adding: ‘The old one and the young one, they both say they’ll never forgive you.’
These later stories of Bowles that come after his compiled Collected Works are a testament to a writer who has adopted another country as his home and immersed himself to observing it and sharing it with others. There is no judgment by him, only admiration and fascination that comes across in his writings, helping us understand that differences or ‘otherness’ is just as important as ‘us-ness.’
Habiba was unperturbed. She knew he considered the pills and injections of the Nazarenes superior to the baraka of the saints. This had nothing to do with her, she decided; she was not going to be influenced by him.
What is particularly catching in ‘The Empty Amulet’ is that Habiba’s husband, Moumen, is a practicing student of medicine, but because of her lack of education (thanks to her father), she holds on to the traditional methods of healings from religious figures. What Bowles has done is to offer two extreme polarities in one couple and prove the weakness of the old method versus the new, without explicitly passing judgment. Suffice it to say, Moumen offer her an amulet said to contain baraka, religious blessings from a fqih, and her symptoms and pains subside. Habiba lives happily and gives birth to a healthy child, until one day she accidentally steps on the amulet and discovers it contains blank papers. The irony of the placebo effect is not lost here. Naturally, her symptoms return.
In the longest of these stories ‘Here to Learn’ we journey with fifteen-year-old Malika who runs away from home, hurt by her mother’s harshness, and we witness a modest, innocent child become a woman traveling the world in the company of western men. In this modern fairy tale-cum-fable, the effects of money and revelry consume the illiterate and poor Malika, who wants to prove her ‘worth’ to her mother. But her decency and redeeming quality remain in her desire to become literate. By-the-by when she eventually returns back home to Tangier, she is faced with tragedy. The prose is engaging and vivid, and the absurd pace and wildness of the adventure – from one locale to another – reminded me several times of Voltaire’s Candide:
When after two months F. T. saw that Malika was, if anything, even more serious and determined about pursuing her practical education, he suggested that the lessons continue at the hotel. Now it was Miss Galper whom Salvador drove to and from Beverly Hills. Occasionally they went shopping—small expeditions to Westwood that delighted Malika because for the first time she was aware of prices, and could gauge the buying power of her money.
Perhaps most poignant in some of the stories is the presence of ‘otherness,’ all those expats or visitors in comparison to the natives and their customs. These stark differences in culture help ground us in what is unique and special about what we are witnessing, they also remind us of how easy it is to feel above others through status or ego; yet for all the simplicity of the natives, they have survived and flourished in their land before the foreigners arrived with their ideas, monies, and dogmas. An experience much of the world has known at the expense of a few colonizing powers. But it is hard to not judge, to not criticize, or to not look down on another, at least more so in the 60s.
It was not his fault that he had lost his job, Abdelkarim explained to his friends. For more than a year and a half he had worked at Patricia’s, and they always had got on smoothly. This is not to say that she did not find fault with him; but Nazarenes always criticize the work Moslems do for them, and he was used to that. Although at such moments she looked at him as though he were a small child, her objections came out in a gentler voice than most Nazarenes use.
In ‘The Dismissal’ Abdelkarim is forced to go into hiding after accidentally witnessing a crime on his specially requested free day from work. He runs away but then looks back and recognizes one of the criminals, and he is recognized in return. So, to spare himself and possibly his employers, he leaves the job without notice and goes into hiding for two months, until he finally hears that the criminals were captured on that same day. Knowing he is safe, he returns to Tangier and straight to Patricia’s house, only to be told by the maid Patricia would not see him, adding: ‘The old one and the young one, they both say they’ll never forgive you.’
These later stories of Bowles that come after his compiled Collected Works are a testament to a writer who has adopted another country as his home and immersed himself to observing it and sharing it with others. There is no judgment by him, only admiration and fascination that comes across in his writings, helping us understand that differences or ‘otherness’ is just as important as ‘us-ness.’
May 12, 2016
Hell is only for people who haven't suffered enough here.
*
She shut her eyes and sat quietly, feeling that she had gone much too far away- so far that now she was nowhere. Outside the world, she whispered to herself in Arabic, and shivered.
*
[...] now she saw herself as someone shipwrecked on an unknown shore peopled by creatures whose intentions were unfathomable. And no one could come to rescue her, for no one knew she was there.
*
All you can do is accept what has happened...
*
She shut her eyes and sat quietly, feeling that she had gone much too far away- so far that now she was nowhere. Outside the world, she whispered to herself in Arabic, and shivered.
*
[...] now she saw herself as someone shipwrecked on an unknown shore peopled by creatures whose intentions were unfathomable. And no one could come to rescue her, for no one knew she was there.
*
All you can do is accept what has happened...
December 20, 2017
I believed I had read all the fiction Paul Bowles ever published in these 18 years since his death. The discovery last week of the short story collection Midnight Mass, with the familiar Black Sparrow paperback binding - earthy tan with green, purple block print - was thus an emotional experience.
Immediately I was flooded by memories and thoughts of the man I considered my favorite author from the time I discovered him in '87, the summer I got my first tattoo, until his death at the end of the last century.
Instantly, too, in that powerful way that great literature connects us with the world we are in, I remembered myself experiencing his works: where I was, the effect it had upon me. The empowerment and awe I felt after finishing one of his short stories or novels: blown away.
Paul Bowles was a huge influence on me as a writer and thinker. He was one of the most powerful allies in my struggle with immigration to the United States and in philosophical discourse in Europe. That he wrote from the subconscious as described by his wife, Jane, was the most romantic and amazing concept to me when I was young and I longed to be able to do that - not to understand it, but to do it.
The utter irrationality of the Western project, the neoliberal insanity we have all endured so long, was exposed by Bowles and then swiftly and violently shattered by the reality of life among the desert people of North Africa. In other works, a slow and seemingly disconnected series of events between locals in a village would be described with such lucidity and simplicity that the differences in thinking between east and west were made suddenly crystalline in the end - hits you like a koan.
The collision of culture was total and instead of Coca-Cola and the Golden Arches mowing down the village, the puny, minuscule westerners melted away in the heat of the Saharan sun, driven mad.
Midnight Mass is the last collection of Bowles' short stories published by Black Sparrow and features at its center the elegant, drifting, rootless novella Here To Learn, a gorgeous story about a girl from North Africa who just keeps moving buoyed by her beauty, her wit and her ability to learn quickly how to negotiate the West.
The collection starts with the titular story, Midnight Mass, one of Bowles' incredible parties; the Nazarenes careening around in their expatriated stupor of drinking, carousing and complaining, the locals bursting with romance only to become suddenly something else - the change of face.
There are stories about the locals and their fantastic, sometimes circuitous logic and its culmination in a kind of basic justice. There are tales about the utter undoing of our perception of a shared understanding of this world.
At the Krungthep Plaza is an amazing story set as the U.S. President is due to pass through a certain North African village. The machinations behind the scenes and the conflicts between locals, expats and the security teams are expertly related, culminating in a wild effusion of emotions that I can only described as angst against the way things are now.
It's all just so great. I miss Paul Bowles.
(sigh)
Immediately I was flooded by memories and thoughts of the man I considered my favorite author from the time I discovered him in '87, the summer I got my first tattoo, until his death at the end of the last century.
Instantly, too, in that powerful way that great literature connects us with the world we are in, I remembered myself experiencing his works: where I was, the effect it had upon me. The empowerment and awe I felt after finishing one of his short stories or novels: blown away.
Paul Bowles was a huge influence on me as a writer and thinker. He was one of the most powerful allies in my struggle with immigration to the United States and in philosophical discourse in Europe. That he wrote from the subconscious as described by his wife, Jane, was the most romantic and amazing concept to me when I was young and I longed to be able to do that - not to understand it, but to do it.
The utter irrationality of the Western project, the neoliberal insanity we have all endured so long, was exposed by Bowles and then swiftly and violently shattered by the reality of life among the desert people of North Africa. In other works, a slow and seemingly disconnected series of events between locals in a village would be described with such lucidity and simplicity that the differences in thinking between east and west were made suddenly crystalline in the end - hits you like a koan.
The collision of culture was total and instead of Coca-Cola and the Golden Arches mowing down the village, the puny, minuscule westerners melted away in the heat of the Saharan sun, driven mad.
Midnight Mass is the last collection of Bowles' short stories published by Black Sparrow and features at its center the elegant, drifting, rootless novella Here To Learn, a gorgeous story about a girl from North Africa who just keeps moving buoyed by her beauty, her wit and her ability to learn quickly how to negotiate the West.
The collection starts with the titular story, Midnight Mass, one of Bowles' incredible parties; the Nazarenes careening around in their expatriated stupor of drinking, carousing and complaining, the locals bursting with romance only to become suddenly something else - the change of face.
There are stories about the locals and their fantastic, sometimes circuitous logic and its culmination in a kind of basic justice. There are tales about the utter undoing of our perception of a shared understanding of this world.
At the Krungthep Plaza is an amazing story set as the U.S. President is due to pass through a certain North African village. The machinations behind the scenes and the conflicts between locals, expats and the security teams are expertly related, culminating in a wild effusion of emotions that I can only described as angst against the way things are now.
It's all just so great. I miss Paul Bowles.
(sigh)
May 26, 2012
This is my first encounter with Mr. Bowles. This collection of short stories was interesting because the author lived in Tangier, Morocco for many years... but that's about all that makes the book. I didn't find any brilliance in the descriptions or the construction, and so became slightly disinterested with the narratives.
Of the collected stories, my favorite was the first. Entitled 'Midnight Mass', the narrative revolved around an adult visiting his childhood home during Christmas.
Of the collected stories, my favorite was the first. Entitled 'Midnight Mass', the narrative revolved around an adult visiting his childhood home during Christmas.
April 25, 2008
In this latest (and last) collection of his short works, Bowles remains a master of prose and intimate of North African culture. What his earlier stories had, however, and which these sadly lack is a sense of immediacy and discomfort. The characters in "Midnight Mass" are almost always in their own element, as it were, and seem rarely at the mercy of their adoptive cultural landscape. Thus, the sense of danger is erased, along with much of the tension.
Not only are these stories bland, then, but also heavily post-colonial in their treatment of native habits. I never thought I'd see Bowles actually do this, based on what I'd read before, all of which had been written long before this collection. In these stories, ex-pats don't often find themselves so much at the life-or-death mercy of their environs as they do at the point of mere, harmless confusion.
In short, the stakes just aren't as high, and the pages don't turn as quickly. The prose is masterful, but in the way that his characters seem to reminisce a more far-flung frontier from an earlier and wilder time, Bowles himself seems more to reminisce here the fact that he's not putting them there anymore.
Not only are these stories bland, then, but also heavily post-colonial in their treatment of native habits. I never thought I'd see Bowles actually do this, based on what I'd read before, all of which had been written long before this collection. In these stories, ex-pats don't often find themselves so much at the life-or-death mercy of their environs as they do at the point of mere, harmless confusion.
In short, the stakes just aren't as high, and the pages don't turn as quickly. The prose is masterful, but in the way that his characters seem to reminisce a more far-flung frontier from an earlier and wilder time, Bowles himself seems more to reminisce here the fact that he's not putting them there anymore.
June 11, 2023
Hay algunos cuentos muy buenos y otros tantos no, pero en general es un buen libro.
July 20, 2008
Refreshingly unAmerican.
April 19, 2020
Paul Bowles is the kind of writer I can pick up & get absorbed in whenever nothing is hitting the spot. Oddly, though, with this collection I kept thinking of the writing of Mohamed Mrabet who Bowles translates. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve read more Mrabet than Bowles the last year, but this had that extra sparse folkloric feeling that Mrabet’s work has.
August 2, 2018
Pequenos contos sobre episódios, quase todo sobre a vida de ocidentais em Marrocos, quase todos muito interessantes e curiosos, e com tão fino sentido de observação que parecem cenas vividas pelo próprio Bowles.
April 1, 2020
Stories that go nowhere. Some people are into that. I get it he wanted to cut a frame of daily life for each short story. Well daily life is boring. I also did not think the writing style was very good.
January 30, 2020
A master storyteller always with a smidge of terror.
April 5, 2025
As always I am hooked to each and every one of his short stories, a master of manipulating your emotions in just 4-5 pages
September 22, 2025
This short story collection is for those who have made what felt like the right choice (whether morally or socially) and still ended up with an unfortunate outcome.
This collection is also for those who have unknowingly made a bad choice, and had to deal with a devastating outcome. In short words, you make the right choice, bad stuff happens; you make the wrong choice, bad stuff happens too. Such is life, damn it.
I enjoyed most of the stories in this collection, but once you see how the first handful of them end, you can just as well guess how the rest of them will end too. It would have been nice to see one end in a good note, for a change. In my head, what saved this compilation is the fact that they were compiled after they were written through the years. He Bowles didn’t just set out to write a collection of stories with heartbreaking endings.
Lastly, I had put off reading this collection because it said most of the stories were set in Morocco, and what the hell do I know about Morocco? Yeah, nothing, so it was great to see how other cultures in the world work, and how their traditions affect them, just like anybody else. I had to look up plenty of words, most of them with a religious connotation, but that was good learning. We shouldn’t be intimidated by learning about other countries in the world. I picked up this book because of Black Sparrow, and Bukowski, but if I find more of this author in the wild I will give him a chance.
This collection is also for those who have unknowingly made a bad choice, and had to deal with a devastating outcome. In short words, you make the right choice, bad stuff happens; you make the wrong choice, bad stuff happens too. Such is life, damn it.
I enjoyed most of the stories in this collection, but once you see how the first handful of them end, you can just as well guess how the rest of them will end too. It would have been nice to see one end in a good note, for a change. In my head, what saved this compilation is the fact that they were compiled after they were written through the years. He Bowles didn’t just set out to write a collection of stories with heartbreaking endings.
Lastly, I had put off reading this collection because it said most of the stories were set in Morocco, and what the hell do I know about Morocco? Yeah, nothing, so it was great to see how other cultures in the world work, and how their traditions affect them, just like anybody else. I had to look up plenty of words, most of them with a religious connotation, but that was good learning. We shouldn’t be intimidated by learning about other countries in the world. I picked up this book because of Black Sparrow, and Bukowski, but if I find more of this author in the wild I will give him a chance.
January 27, 2008
Unfortunately, Bowles has less of a mastery over the short story as he does over the novel. His stories feel emulative of really great short stories (such as Hemingway's terse masterpieces), without actually being great. By that I mean they seem to have all the right characteristics: the same self-assured cadence, the same immediacy of character, the same revelatory but incomplete resolutions -- but somehow fail to be especially interesting or, more to the point, emotionally engaging.
February 5, 2016
Good. But could definitely have been better. After the experience of reading Bowles' "The Sheltering Sky", this collection of short stories failed to match up to the initial expectation. Set primarily in northern Africa, these stories just scratch the surface of the characters without doing much justice to the possibilities of making more out of them.
March 30, 2011
Not a huge fan of his stuff. They're interesting mood pieces and give a nice account of life abroad, but this collection felt a little weak to me. Didn't really connect with a lot of what was going on. Well-written, if a bit like Camus in translation.
February 21, 2010
a few more stories from a master.
February 26, 2010
I'm still reading it and enjoying!
April 15, 2012
This was great. "Here to Learn" made me lulz. Very enjoyable reads, good reads.
July 5, 2012
A very good collection of Bowles's writing from the late 1970s through the early 1980s. The standout story for me was "In the Red Room," added to the 1983 and later editions of the book.
August 16, 2013
Bowles stories are transmissions from a strange, affecting, dangerous and breathtaking place.
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews