"Paul Bowles has opened the world of Hip. He let in the murder, the drugs, the incest, the death of the Square...the call of the orgy, the end of civilization."--Norman Mailer""The Delicate Prey" is 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 pise and authority entirely its own, capable of instantly modulating from farce to horror without a ruffle and without giving any signal of delight in itself. It never goes on parade."--Tobia Wolff, "Esquire""Paul Bowles''s sense of what can go wrong is as acute as that of any American writer since Poe. It''s not simply the subject matter but the pitiless clarity, the unblinking regard in the face of human frailty and cruelty, that is so disquieting in Bowles''s work. Whereas the terror in Poe seems to arise from an overheated romantic imagination suffering the torments it bodies forth, Bowles''s sensibility is calssical in is aloofness, his prose as hard-edged and dazzling as a desert landscape at noon."--Jay McInerney, "Vanity Fair"