Paul Bowles’s classic collection of short stories, now available in a a deluxe paperback edition-part of Ecco’s Art of the Story series &#8220All the tales are a variety of detective story, &#8221 wrote Bowles of this, his first short story collection, &#8220in which the reader is the detective; the mystery is in the motivation for the charcters’ behavior.&#8221 In such stories as &#8220A Distant Episode&#8221 and How Many Midnights, &#8221 Bowles pushes human character beyond socially defined limits and maps a transformed (often horribly transformed) reality. Bowles captures the duality of human frailty and cruelty in these seventeen taut and atmospheric tales, written between 1939 and 1949. Brutal and gorgeous, visceral yet profound, this timeless collection is &#8220one of the most profound, beautifully wrought, and haunting collections in our literature. . . at once austere, witty, violent, and sensuous. . . . His language has a purity of line, a poise and authority entirely its own, capable of instantly modulating from farce to horror without a ruffle&#8221 (Tobias Wolff).