The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Stories of Paul Bowles by Paul Bowles
Anne Foltz

Paul Bowles. The Stories of Paul Bowles. Intro. Robert Stone. Ecco, 2001. 657 pp. $39.95.

This new collection looks impressive right from the first glance at the cover—a photograph of Bowles seated in front of an enormous pile of luggage, meticulously dressed, with his trademark cigarette in its holder. Bowles stares at the camera with the same look of calm detachment that dominates his short fiction. The familiar stories, such as “The Delicate Prey,” “A Distant Episode,” and “The Frozen Fields,” appear along with some of the harder-to-find later stories from Midnight Mass and Things Gone and Things Still Here. The choice to arrange the stories in chronological order rather than grouping them as they appeared in print is especially nice for those interested in seeing Bowles’s stylistic development. Typically, Bowles’s characters are interlopers traveling to strange and exotic settings about which they feel culturally and intellectually superior, an attitude most often savagely dispelled by locals. Bowles not only shows his readers what it is like to be an outsider, but also—and perhaps more importantly—how those we regard as “foreign” view Westerners who attempt to bring “civilization” to their cultures. The twentieth century can offer no finer writer to capture these increasingly rare collisions of cultures and peoples, something that Gore Vidal noted in his introduction to Bowles’s Collected Stories, published in 1979. Unlike Vidal, however, Robert Stone’s introduction is marked by a touch of intellectual cynicism with its references to cultural icons, many of whom came into contact with Bowles only minimally and whose association with him has been—rightly or wrongly—reinforced by a desire to make Bowles’s work somehow more historically and culturally relevant. This, however, is only a small distraction in this remarkable collection of some of the best short stories written in the last century. [Anne Foltz]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction The Stories of Paul Bowles by Paul Bowles Anne Foltz Paul Bowles. The Stories of Paul Bowles. Intro. Robert Stone. Ecco, 2001. 657 pp. $39.95. This new collection looks impressive right from the first glance at the cover—a photograph of Bowles seated in front of an enormous pile of luggage, meticulously dressed, with his trademark cigarette in its holder. Bowles stares at the camera with the same look of calm detachment that dominates his short fiction. The familiar stories, such as “The Delicate Prey,” “A Distant Episode,” and “The Frozen Fields,” appear along with some of the harder-to-find later stories from Midnight Mass and Things Gone and Things Still Here. The choice to arrange the stories in chronological order rather than grouping them as they appeared in print is especially nice for those interested in seeing Bowles’s stylistic development. Typically, Bowles’s characters are interlopers traveling to strange and exotic settings about which they feel culturally and intellectually superior, an attitude most often savagely dispelled by locals. Bowles not only shows his readers what it is like to be an outsider, but also—and perhaps more importantly—how those we regard as “foreign” view Westerners who attempt to bring “civilization” to their cultures. The twentieth century can offer no finer writer to capture these increasingly rare collisions of cultures and peoples, something that Gore Vidal noted in his introduction to Bowles’s Collected Stories, published in 1979. Unlike Vidal, however, Robert Stone’s introduction is marked by a touch of intellectual cynicism with its references to cultural icons, many of whom came into contact with Bowles only minimally and whose association with him has been—rightly or wrongly—reinforced by a desire to make Bowles’s work somehow more historically and culturally relevant. This, however, is only a small distraction in this remarkable collection of some of the best short stories written in the last century. [Anne Foltz]

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