The Delicate Prey - Softcover

Bowles, Paul

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141195827 ISBN 13: 9780141195827

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2011

Synopsis

'And then one day a solitary figure appeared, moving toward them across the lifeless plain from the west.One man on a camel... '

Paul Bowles's unforgettable short stories portray people facing hostile environments and the innate savagery of humanity. These three unbearably tense tales from sun-drenched and brutal climes tell of vengeance, abandonment, violence and cruelty enjoyed and suffered, in a surreal realm of horror.

This book includes The Delicate Prey, A Distant Episode and The Circular Ruins.

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"

From the Back Cover

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 vida

All 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 edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0141195827
• ISBN 13: 9780141195827
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 64