The Stories of Paul Bowles

The short fiction of American literary cult figure Paul Bowles is marked by a unique, delicately spare style, and a dark, rich, exotic mood, by turns chilling, ironic, and wry--possessing a symmetry between beauty and terror that is haunting and ultimately moral. In Pastor Dowe at Tecaté, a Protestant missionary is sent to a faraway place where his God has no power. In Call at Corazón, an American husband abandons his alcoholic wife on their honeymoon in a South American jungle. In Allal, a boy's drug-induced metamorphosis into a deadly serpent leads to his violent death. Here also are some of Bowles's most famous works, including The Delicate Prey, a grimly satisfying tale of vengeance, and A Distant Episode, which Tennessee Williams proclaimed a masterpiece.