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 reciprocity, in the groups of beings assembled upon his intensely but somberly lighted sets. The drama is that of the single being rather than of beings in relation to each other. Paul Bowles has experienced an unmistakable revulsion from the act of social participation…. ["The Delicate Prey and Other Stories" is] the exploration of a cavern of individual sensibilities, and fortunately the cavern is a deep one containing a...