DELICATE PREY DELX ED: And Other Stories (Art of the Story) - Softcover

Bowles, Paul

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0062393855 ISBN 13: 9780062393852

Publisher: EccoPress, 2015

Synopsis

From master storyteller Paul Bowles comes a new addition to ecco's the art of the story series "essential reading" for any witness to the magic of the short form, writes vendela vidaAll the tales are a variety of detective story," writes Bowles of this, his first short story collection, "in which the reader is the detective; the mystery is in 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, mapping a transformed often horribly transformed reality.Bowles captures the duality of human frailty and cruelty in these seventeen taut and atmospheric tales, written between 1939 and 1949. Brutal and gorgeous, visceral and profound, this timeless collection is "one of the most profound, beautifully wrought, and haunting collections in our literature... at once austere, witty, violent, and sensuous....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" (Tobias Wolff)."

About this title

Review

"Paul Bowles has opened the world of Hip. He let in the murder, the drugs, the incest, the death of the Square...the call of the orgy, the end of civilization."--Norman Mailer""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 pise and authority entirely its own, capable of instantly modulating from farce to horror without a ruffle and without giving any signal of delight in itself. It never goes on parade."--Tobia Wolff, "Esquire""Paul Bowles's sense of what can go wrong is as acute as that of any American writer since Poe. It's not simply the subject matter but the pitiless clarity, the unblinking regard in the face of human frailty and cruelty, that is so disquieting in Bowles's work. Whereas the terror in Poe seems to arise from an overheated romantic imagination suffering the torments it bodies forth, Bowles's sensibility is calssical in is aloofness, his prose as hard-edged and dazzling as a desert landscape at noon."--Jay McInerney, "Vanity Fair"

About the Author

Paul Bowles was born in 1910 and studied music with composer Aaron Copland before moving to Tangier, Morocco. A devastatingly imaginative observer of the West's encounter with the East, he is the author of four highly acclaimed novels: The Sheltering Sky, Let It Come Down, The Spider's House, and Up Above the World. In addition to being one of the most powerful postwar American novelists, Bowles was an acclaimed composer, a travel writer, a poet, a translator, and a short story writer. He died in Morocco in 1999.

Vendela Vida is the award-winning author of five books including And Now You Can Go, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, and The Lovers. A founding editor of The Believer magazine, she lives in Northern California with her husband and two children.

About this edition

• Publisher: EccoPress
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0062393855
• ISBN 13: 9780062393852
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320