A Distant Episode

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No one who reads this story ever forgets it, though one might well wish to forget it, like a bad dream that imposes itself, with ominous significance, upon the daylight, civilized world. Though "A Distant Episode" has become the most frequently anthologized of Paul Bowles's fiction, I could not resist including it here. It is both the highest achievement of this intransigent artist's work in fiction and representative of his imagination generally.

Born in New York City, Paul Bowles has had two distinct careers: as a composer, and as a writer and translator. During the 1930's and 1940's he was a music critic for the New York Herald Tribune, and wrote musical scores for Broadway. Since 1945, he has lived in Tangier, and has concentrated upon literature. His first novel, The Sheltering Sky, was published in 1949 to considerable acclaim and notoriety; subsequent titles established his reputation as a chronicler of a world almost entirely devoid of the "manners" that constitute most works of fiction in our tradition. These are the story collections The Delicate Prey (1950), The Time of Friendship (1967), and Collected Stories (1979); the novels Let It Come Down (1952), The Spider's House (1955), and Up Above the World (1966). Bowles's nonfiction books include Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue: Scenes from the Non-Christian World (1963) and Things Gone and Things Still Here (1977). His poetry has been collected in Next to Nothing (1981) and his autobiography, the enigmatic Without Stopping, was published in 1972.

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