The Delicate Prey
Paul Bowles once said that a story should remain taut throughout, like a piece of string. That tense, stretched tone is the key to this collection of 17 eerie tales by the author best known forThe Sheltering Sky.The Delicate Preyis dedicated: "For my mother, who first read me the stories of Poe." If Poe had lived in Mexico, and he'd had ice water running in his veins to counteract his feverish romanticism, he might have crafted something like these odd vignettes about human frailty and cruelty. The setting is a world where palm trees are like "shiny green spiders," where bats reel silently overhead in a jet-black sky, where a hot, relentless wind blows across deserted plazas.As Tobias Wolff writes inEsquire, "The Delicate Preyis 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 poise and  authority entirely its own, capable of instantly modulating from  farce to horror without a ruffle."