Collected Stories

by Paul Bowles

In these hauntingly beautiful stories of abandonment and vengeance, extreme situations lead to disturbing conclusions. A missionary is sent to a place so distant he finds his God has no power there; a husband abandons his wife as they honeymoon in the South American jungle; a splash of water triggers an explosion of violence; and a boy's drug-induced transformation leads to cruelty enjoyed and suffered.

Masterfully written, these are chilling tales from sun-drenched and brutal climes.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Literature, Literary Fiction, American, Collections, Morocco

672 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

Paul 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.

Reviews

[Steven Godin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning collection. Some of these stories are going to remain strong in my mind and haunt me for a long while to come. Like his masterpiece The Sheltering Sky, Bowles really gets under the skin in a dark, sinister and mesmeric way. Review to follow.

[Tayib · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hideous and horrifying. If you aren't yet scared of Arabs, this'll do the trick. In truth, if you haven't yet learned to be afraid of all people and simultaneously in awe of their beauty, Paul Bowles can show you the way.

The following is lifted from "The Sheltering Sky" and were some of the first words I heard that made me reckon with mortality:

"Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."

[Amari · Rating 5 out of 5]

stunning. some of these stories really approach perfection. i read many of them about 10 years ago, but i reread every last one this summer and found no fault with any of them. bowles' tendency toward a concomitant sensitivity and roughness is irresistible, and i am very attracted by his ability to write about cultures that are not his own without setting up the "us-them" dichotomy which is the downfall of so much travel writing (fictional and non-). in fact, bowles often does use an "us-them" dichotomy, but "we" and "they" are unrelated to cultural background or nationality, rather going directly to the foundations of humanness with compassion and an utter absence of sentimentality.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first collection of Paul Bowles' stories, published in 1979. Since then, he wrote more stories, and other collections have been issued, but this book launched Bowles to worldwide recognition.

It includes all the unforgettable seventeen stories from The Delicate Prey and Other Stories (1950). I have read that set several times and they always are fresh and shocking, in a good way. How did the best of these stories, "Pages from Cold Point," get past the censors in 1950? Read that one for the eerie, detached, cold narrative voice much like Poe used in his poetry...oh, and read it for sexy Racky, too.

The other twenty-two stories included here, written after 1949, are not quite as good. Four or five relate experiences while high on kif and can be ignored, but the others support Bowles' reputation as one of the best short story writers of the twentieth century.

[Will · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, just beautiful. And scary. The best in here, to me, are "A Distant Episode," "The Fourth Day Out from Santa Cruz," and "Pastor Dowe at Tacate." Three of my all-time favorite short stories, and they're all in this one, beautifully bound book. Amazing.

I love the sense of alienation that Bowles's characters evince. These stories all feel cold and frightening, yet beautiful. Many of them proceed through a sort of dreamy reality that makes the pacing seem ethereal at times, like a dream, and it adds to the feeling of alienation, making us, the readers, feel alone along with the narrators, who are in constant peril.

These are stories to get lost in, stories that exist outside of time. These are nightmares written down.

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Paul Bowles is a very cold creepy writer. And that's what makes him wonderful. The unique way he reads 'culture' outside of the European/American existence is both fascinating and superb at the same moment. An unusual writer in a rather special time in literary history.

I much prefer his short stories than his novels. I just like his concrete intense energy in telling of these strange tales. The Beats had a great admiration for Bowles, because I think he traveled not only locations, but also head wise as well.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

I worked through these while on holiday in Crete. Some of the bleakest stuff I’ve ever read. The 12 pages of A Distant Episode make Ligotti look cheerful, worth the price of the book alone.

[PhattandyPDX · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The sky trembles and the earth is afraid, and the two eyes are not brothers.“

[Suzi · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you want a taste of Paul Bowles that's wonderful and disturbing... read his collection of short fiction. His genius is in taking us away from what we feel is normal--our preconceptions of who were are--to ourselves and to the ones we love. What happens when human beings are in a totally alien world. where one cannot assume anything, let alone the direction the breezes blow at night and through your room. And what pestilence and open sore and medieval stasis awaits around the next bend? Always a journey with so many writers. And place. If you want to get a good taste of being in an "alien" culture... where your mind cannot jump ahead knowing what is next, because you DON'T know what is next, and you don't know what motivates some of these characters in these strange stories. If you am one o'dem folks who likes to be transported away away on a magic carpet to somewhere not here, no 7 11's, no t.v., no help thy neighbor, no constancy that you recognize, nothing is up but that is down. Paul Bowles leads us into nooks and crannies of the world and of ourselves we did not know existed.

[Patrick McCoy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Collected Short Stories of Paul Bowles: this collection certifies Bowles brilliance. I have enjoyed his novels, but these fascinating short stories reveal him to be one of the greatest American writers of the century, perhaps the most under-rated American writer. I like the fact that his stories are often set in exotic locals like Morocco, S. America, Mexico, and Thailand. He is also good with stories about expats as well as those written form the point of view of locals, some of these stories comes across like parables.

There are several memorable stories, but "A Distant Episode" in particular is brilliant. It's about an ethnologist who goes to study a distant tribe and is drugged fed mushrooms, has his tongue cut out and made to dance before the tribe. His later stories lose none of his precision in story telling either; it is a solid body of work. Highly recommended, however, it's a bit of a doorstop at 657 pages.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Paul Bowles was a bit of a polymath: a talented composer, much admired by Virgil Thomson and Aaron Copland, who showed promise in both classical and popular styles, who chose instead to focus on fiction, after the success of his novel The Sheltering Sky. I'll leave discussion of his complicated personal life to others, along with speculation on whether his wife Jane Bowles was the more talented author. These short stories give a sense of his powers as an author - lyrical, perverse, and utterly compelling.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The Delicate Prey" may very well be the most perfect short story I've ever read, whatever the hell that means. I guess that every word not only sounds and feels and looks as if it belongs but that the story as a whole is one I simply cannot forget and will always reference as a model short story--that impossible moment when the way I read, what and whom I read, was forever changed.

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite collections of short stories. There are times when Bowles dispenses with traditional story conventions, as in there are no heroes or villains, some stories never reach a resolution, some don't even have a moral to them. All I know is once you've read "A Distant Episode" your life will never be the same.

[Devon Valderas · Rating 5 out of 5]

poe meets camus

[olivia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I feel that Bowles is at his best when he pens short stories. He really knows how to condense suspense and tense scenarios into a few pages, usually leaving you unsettled. Wonderful.

[Tom Bentley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Don't read these stories by yourself, because you won't go outside. Well, kidding (mostly). Bowles has an uncanny ability to start a story on even ground, and then it goes careering about, mostly downward, into situations that often reveal the lack of ethical—or common—sense in the characters. He's also a master of atmospheric threat: shadows loom, literally and figuratively, and people you first regard as benign have the devil's work about them.

A murder might be committed for a piece of cake, a family member disowned for an askew word. So many of these stories move on misunderstandings between people, with results those mentioned above. Great atmospherics on senses of place, whether Tangier or Mexico or South America or Europe. And using another sense of place, many characters are undone by being in the wrong place, or being wrong in their judgments of other characters' motivations. The psychology of characters who seem amoral is well worked, if scary.

If this is your first encounter with Bowles, hie thee to the bookstore and get The Sheltering Sky. All of the senses of dislocation, unease, misunderstanding and menace (and a striking sense of place) discussed here are magnified 100-fold in Sky; it's a masterpiece.

[Algirdas Kraunaitis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Finally, my three month long battle with this book is over. These Penguin 'Collected Stories' editions are so alluring, a sexy challenge for a reader. And there are some good ones in this collection, especially in the first half of the book. But so many of them rely on this insistent and unreflective othering of non-europeans, shallow shock value happenings and gender/race stereotypes, that I just found reading a complete set of Bowles stories rather a chore. Interestingly, the last few stories, written at the end of his life, show a turn for the more experimental (like the stories with no punctuation marks) or casual preoccupations (stories written as letters or everyday life matters), which were a sort of relief - far too late, considering how big this collection is (66 stories in total). I will not read this collection again and I don't think I am particularly interested in reading his novels, but I might pick up a smaller set sometime in the future.

[JerryDeanHalleck · Rating 2 out of 5]

If I was to summarize Bowles as a writer, I'd say: "Great prose style, nothing to say".

And thats how I felt after reading all his stories. While reading them, I enjoyed them. But 20 minutes later I couldn't remember what they were about. His characters don't come to life, they're always vague and ghost-like. So, even though the prose style was great, I can't really recommend the stories.

Bowles was a very smart, talented man. But he was always an alienated outsider. Not just in the USA, but in Morroco, where he never learned Arabic. Politics: A Communist. Sexual idenity: A Gay man married to a Lesbian. Nationality: An expat American. Religion: None. Children: None. Hobby: Smoked a lot of Hashish.

[Darren · Rating 2 out of 5]

Don't think I have ever been as underwhelmed with a book as I was with this. I had it on my shelf for a while and had read great things about Bowles writing e.g. the greatest short story writer of all time etc. Bowles for me is a mediocre writer. I find his stories mainly boring and often infantile, his more surreal drug induced ones plain stupid, the kind of stuff a teenage pothead might come up with. Maybe when the world was less well traveled these stories brought something of the exotic to readers but reading today in 2020 I personally found them aimlessly meandering. Haven't read them all, so maybe I missed something but I doubt it.

[Chuck · Rating 5 out of 5]

First rate fiction from an outstanding writer. I'd like to read more--maybe The Sheltering Sky.
My recent binge of binge-watching shows on Netflix (including Seasons 4, 5, 6, and 7 of Shameless) has cut into my reading time over the last couple of months, so I moved through these stories more slowly than usual.
Bowles lived an unusually interesting life and excelled in both music and writing. I'd like to know more about him.

[Dale Boyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Modern Master

I have loved these ever since reading them upon arriving in Chicago over 30 years ago. Rereading them now, I still find them among some of the best ever written. Some are personal favorites: A Distant Episode, Pages from Cold Point, Call at Corazon, The Delicate Prey, Tapiama, and the sadly-too-true, little gem of a fable, The Garden. His work is decidedly odd and often disturbing, but I find his writing breathtakingly elegant and precise. Cold and hard, and very effective.

[MzMay · Rating 3 out of 5]

In an interview, Bowles rated his most successful short stories as: Distant Episode, Pastor Dowe, Senor Ong and Call at Corazon.

I liked Circular Valley the most of this collection. Mostly, I thought Bowles was one sick puppy. These stories focus on the worst of human behavior, and are quite dark. I appreciate the originality - each story is completely different that the other and you never feel he rehashes anything. It takes a lot of craft to not do the same things over and over again.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Uneven, but mostly sharp and thought-provoking. All the stories have a powerful sense of place (and people) and read as surprisingly modern especially given the turn-of-colonial setting of many of them in 1950s and 1960s French and Spanish run north Africa, central America and elsewhere. The best stories come early in the collection, later writings are often episodic and anecdotal, rather than true narratives. But all good.

[Habiba Ihab · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were stories that were so boring I couldn’t finish, and there were ones that left me in tears and that I loved.
Yet, it seems like most of the stories, if not all of them, portrayed arabs and north africains in an extremely negative way. Thus, many of the reviews on this book mentioned hating Arabs after reading it, but I wouldn’t depend on this book to judge anyone since one should not generalize.

[keith koenigsberg · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love Bowles' stuff, but these stories contained only a few highlights. Mostly they seemed hastily put together. Who came first, Bowles or Hemingway? It seems sometimes that Bowles felt that writing about exotic lands while on drugs would be enough to entertain the reader. Not so. I get the feeling he was marking time and making money between his novels with these under-realized filler pieces.

[Nabil · Rating 3 out of 5]

Une première entrée en matière dans l'œuvre de Paul Bowles.
Des nouvelles plutôt intéressantes, certains ont pour cadre le Maroc de la première moitié du 20e siècle et l'écrivain réussit à être suffisamment fidèle à l'environnement décrit.

[John Ollerton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pretty damn good. A lot is unsaid but with background facts, very knowledgeable, but very dark and sinister stories from this masterful short story writer and composer.

[Josh Cohen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly recommended. Fair warning: these stories can be disturbing. But the writing is always fantastic.

[Darren · Rating 5 out of 5]

The short story form is one of my favourites and Paul Bowles shows his mastery over it throughout these collected works. Particualrly good are the north African pieces.

[Jade Aslain · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thanks to this book, Paul Bowles is now one of my favorite writers.