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 published stories are set in the United States. The bulk take place in various parts of North Africa, where he has lived most of his life. Still others are set in Latin America, Sri Lanka, and Thailand, places Bowles came to know through his travels. Bowles's best-known stories--such as "The Delicate Prey" and "A Distant Episode"--send chills down the spine. The grotesque and horrifying acts in these and some other Bowles stories are connected to fears and misunderstandings accompanying contact between contrasting cultures with contrasting values or, more basically, between the self and the unknown other. In all his stories Bowles masterfully...