[Bowles's Collected Stories is] often brutal, sometimes night-marish, full of sudden inexplicable violences. They present an unsettling mixture of linguistic austerity and exotic settings. Many of the tales are located in North Africa or Mexico, places Bowles knew well, but likely to be unfamiliar to Americans, and therefore both intriguing and discomforting. These are not easy reading, but they are compelling. Unflinchingly honest, they illuminate life's uncertainties and terrors.

The most telling stories are often those set distressingly on least familiar ground. The dizzying surfeit of sights and sounds commands close attention to detail precisely because it offers few of the expected cultural or geographical categories against which we usually measure people, places, actions. Unable to locate the events simply within behavioral conventions, we become newly attentive to the relationships of characters and the landscapes they inhabit. We begin to discover the disturbing beauty of intractable lands where...