Paul Bowles is one of the best American short-story writers of the twentieth century. The most salient aspect of all Bowles's fiction, the four novels as well as the short fiction, is the use of foreign settings. Only a handful of his more than sixty...

Paul Bowles has never fit well into a single category; he is intensely private, preferring to display his life only in art and variously as poet, short-story writer, novelist, translator, journalist, musicologist, and composer (operas, film and theatre...

Even though Paul Bowles (1910-1999) wrote stories, composed music, and lived in some of the world's most exotic places, he was not one who craved recognition. The general public, even those who considered themselves well-informed, might not have...

In the following essay, Moss attempts "to locate the aesthetic strategies of (Paul) Bowles's aversion to introspection in Without Stopping."

Paul Bowles is a man and author of exceptional latitude but he has, like nearly all serious artists, a dominant theme. That theme is the fearful isolation of the individual being. (p. 19) Certainly a terrible kind of loneliness is expressed in ["The Delicate Prey and Other Stories"] …, but the isolated beings in these stories have deliberately chosen their isolation in most cases, not merely accepted and endured it. There is a singular lack of human give-and-take, of true emotional reci...

[Although] the meticulously described landscape changes [in The Collected Stories], the situation of Bowles' heroes remains the same. The hero is usually a displaced person; he is suddenly, often brutally compelled to see the "heart of darkness." He is abused, violated, transformed. But Bowles refuses to allow him more than a few seconds of understanding; his broken hero disappears under "the sheItering sky."