The Delicate Prey and Other Stories is a collection of 17 works of short fiction by Paul Bowles, published in 1950 by Random House.

[9] "What is immediately striking--and particularly characteristic of Bowles's fiction--is the distanced, clinical, quietly confident, and authoritative tone; the rigorously unadorned, quasi-journalistic prose style; the sleek, controlled elegance of his sentences…Bowles's approach to his material and to his characters is relentlessly anthropological, unbiased by either contempt and derision on the one hand or by sympathy and affection on the other…"—Francine Prose, in Harper's Magazine (2002)[10] "In the stories of The Delicate Prey, 1950, the medium's limitation seems to enhance the basic virtue of Bowles, his tight control of savage and baleful situations, and to foreshorten his main weakness, the inability to conceive and develop characters dramatically.

"—Ihab Hassan in The Pilgrim as Prey: A Note on Paul Bowles (1954)[11] One of the unifying features of the stories in this collection are their settings: many of them occur in regions foreign to most Americans, including North Africa and Latin America.

Generally, the Bowles' story is told in a fairly straightforward, linear manner [which] supports no moral comment on the actions that take place.

"[23] Literary critic Francine Prose observes: Bowles's fiction is the last place to which one would go for hope, or even for faint reassurance that the world is anything but a senseless horror show…It would be hard to think of another writer so unmoved and uninterested in the traditional values and virtues that we associate with Western humanism (compassion, generosity, empathy), just as it's difficult to find one genuinely heroic character or act of heroism, selflessness, or sacrifice in Bowles's oeuvre.