Books by Patricia Highsmith
Nothing That Meets the Eye: The Uncollected Stories of Patricia Highsmith
"Highsmith is no more a practitioner of the murder mystery genre...than are Doestoevsky, Faulkner and Camus."―Joan Smith, Los Angeles Times The Patricia Highsmith renaissance continues with Nothing That Meets the Eye, a brilliant collection of twenty-eight psychologically penetrating stories, a great majority of which are published for the first time in this collection. This volume spans almost fifty years of Highsmith's career and establishes her as a permanent member of our American literary canon, as attested by recent publication of two of these stories in The New Yorker and Harper's. The stories assembled in Nothing That Meets the Eye, written between 1938 and 1982, are vintage Highsmith: a gigolo-like psychopath preys on unfulfilled career women; a lonely spinster's fragile hold on reality is tethered to the bottle; an estranged postal worker invents homicidal fantasies about his coworkers. While some stories anticipate the diabolical narratives of the Ripley novels, others possess a Capra-like sweetness that forces us to see the author in a new light. From this new collection, a remarkable portrait of the American psyche at mid-century emerges, unforgettably distilled by the inimitable eye of Patricia Highsmith.
A New York Times Notable Book and a Washington Post Rave of 2002. "Almost every piece...contains touches that reveal what a subtle writer Highsmith was."―James Campbell, New York Times "A thrilling compendium of work full of surprises."―Ed Siegel, Boston Globe "One of the exhilarating effects of reading Highsmith's stories...is the greatly enlarged sense of her range and energy...in their surehandedness, their amazing breadth and abundance...[these stories] compel attention and they add significantly to her already formidable presence."―James Lasdun, Washington Post
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Nothing That Meets the Eye: The Uncollected Stories of Patricia Highsmith
"Highsmith is no more a practitioner of the murder mystery genre...than are Doestoevsky, Faulkner and Camus."―Joan Smith, Los Angeles Times The Patricia Highsmith renaissance continues with Nothing That Meets the Eye, a brilliant collection of twenty-eight psychologically penetrating stories, a great majority of which are published for the first time in this collection.
This volume spans almost fifty years of Highsmith's career and establishes her as a permanent member of our American literary canon, as attested by recent publication of two of these stories in The New Yorker and Harper's. The stories assembled in Nothing That Meets the Eye, written between 1938 and 1982, are vintage Highsmith: a gigolo-like psychopath preys on unfulfilled career women; a lonely spinster's fragile hold on reality is tethered to the bottle; an estranged postal worker invents homicidal fantasies about his coworkers. While some stories anticipate the diabolical narratives of the Ripley novels, others possess a Capra-like sweetness that forces us to see the author in a new light. From this new collection, a remarkable portrait of the American psyche at mid-century emerges, unforgettably distilled by the inimitable eye of Patricia Highsmith. A New York Times Notable Book and a Washington Post Rave of 2002.
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The Glass Cell
At last back in print, one of Patricia Highsmith's most disturbing works. Rife with overtones of Dostoyevsky, The Glass Cell, first published forty years ago, combines a quintessential Highsmith mystery with a penetrating critique of the psychological devastation wrought by the prison system. Falsely convicted of fraud, the easygoing but naive Philip Carter is sentenced to six lonely, drug-ravaged years in prison. Upon his release, Carter is a more suspicious and violent man. For those around him, earning back his trust can mean the difference between life and death. The Glass Cell's bleak and compelling portrait of daily prison life―and the consequences for those who live it―is, sadly, as relevant today as it was when the book was first published in 1964.
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Deep Water
by Patricia Highsmith, Watt Key, Emma Bamford, Maren Stoffels
From Watt Key, the author of the acclaimed Alabama Moon, comes a thrilling middle grade survival story about a scuba dive gone wrong and two enemies who must unite to survive.
It's the most important rule of scuba diving: If you don't feel right, don't go down.
So after her father falls ill, twelve-year-old Julie Sims must take over and lead two of his clients on a dive miles off the coast of Alabama while her father stays behind in the boat. When the clients, a reckless boy Julie's age and his equally foolhardy father, disregard Julie's instructions during the dive, she quickly realizes she's in over her head.
And once she surfaces, things only get worse: One of the clients is in serious condition, and their dive boat has vanished―along with Julie's father, the only person who knows their whereabouts. It's only a matter of time before they die of hypothermia, unless they become shark bait first. Though Julie may not like her clients, it's up to her to save them all.
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Deep Water
by Patricia Highsmith, Watt Key, Emma Bamford, Maren Stoffels
Now a major motion picture starring Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas
In Deep Water, set in the quiet, small town of Little Wesley, Patricia Highsmith has created a vicious and suspenseful tale of love gone sour.
Vic and Melinda Van Allen's loveless marriage is held together only by a precarious arrangement whereby, in order to avoid the messiness of divorce, Melinda is allowed to take any number of lovers as long as she does not desert her family. Eventually, Vic can no longer suppress his jealousy and tries to win back his wife by asserting himself through a tall tale of murder―one that soon comes true. In this complex portrayal of a dangerous psychosis emerging in the most unlikely of places, Highsmith examines the chilling reality behind the idyllic facade of American suburban life.
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Deep Water
by Patricia Highsmith, Watt Key, Emma Bamford, Maren Stoffels
From Watt Key, the author of the acclaimed Alabama Moon, comes a thrilling middle grade survival story about a scuba dive gone wrong and two enemies who must unite to survive.
It's the most important rule of scuba diving: If you don't feel right, don't go down.
So after her father falls ill, twelve-year-old Julie Sims must take over and lead two of his clients on a dive miles off the coast of Alabama while her father stays behind in the boat. When the clients, a reckless boy Julie's age and his equally foolhardy father, disregard Julie's instructions during the dive, she quickly realizes she's in over her head.
And once she surfaces, things only get worse: One of the clients is in serious condition, and their dive boat has vanished―along with Julie's father, the only person who knows their whereabouts. It's only a matter of time before they die of hypothermia, unless they become shark bait first. Though Julie may not like her clients, it's up to her to save them all.
Praise for Deep Water:
“Key offers plenty of nail-biting suspense in this survival tale about a deep-sea dive off the Alabama coast that goes horribly wrong . . . The story meticulously details the steps that quick-thinking Julie takes to stay alive. Julie’s troubled family history and her changing relationship with Shane are also examined, intensifying the book’s emotional impact.” ―Publishers Weekly
“A nail-biting survival tale.” ―Kirkus Reviews
“Readers hungry for an epic tale of grueling odds will also find lessons in bravery, resourcefulness, and practical survival advice.” ―Booklist
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Deep Water
by Patricia Highsmith, Watt Key, Emma Bamford, Maren Stoffels
The dark side of paradise is exposed when a terrified couple reveals their daunting experience on a remote island to their rescuers—only to realize they’re still in the grips of the island’s secrets—in this intense and startling debut in the tradition of Into the Jungle and The Ruins.
When a Navy vessel comes across a yacht in distress in the middle of the vast Indian Ocean, Captain Danial Tengku orders his ship to rush to its aid. On board the yacht is a British couple: a horribly injured man, Jake, and his traumatized wife, Virginie, who breathlessly confesses, “It’s all my fault. I killed them.”
Trembling with fear, she reveals their shocking story to Danial. Months earlier, the couple had spent all their savings on a yacht, full of excitement for exploring the high seas and exotic lands together. They start at the busy harbors of Malaysia and, through word of mouth, Jake and Virginie learn about a tiny, isolated island full of unspoiled beaches. When they arrive, they discover they are not the only visitors and quickly become entangled with a motley crew of expat sailors. Soon, Jake and Virginie’s adventurous dream turns into a terrifying nightmare.
Now, it’s up to Danial to determine just how much truth there is in Virginie’s alarming tale. But when his crew make a shocking discovery, he realizes that if he doesn’t act soon, they could all fall under the dark spell of the island.
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Deep Water
by Patricia Highsmith, Watt Key, Emma Bamford, Maren Stoffels
The dark side of paradise is exposed when a terrified couple reveals their daunting experience on a remote island to their rescuers—only to realize they’re still in the grips of the island’s secrets—in this intense and startling debut in the tradition of Into the Jungle and The Ruins.
When a Navy vessel comes across a yacht in distress in the middle of the vast Indian Ocean, Captain Danial Tengku orders his ship to rush to its aid. On board the yacht is a British couple: a horribly injured man, Jake, and his traumatized wife, Virginie, who breathlessly confesses, “It’s all my fault. I killed them.”
Trembling with fear, she reveals their shocking story to Danial. Months earlier, the couple had spent all their savings on a yacht, full of excitement for exploring the high seas and exotic lands together. They start at the busy harbors of Malaysia and, through word of mouth, Jake and Virginie learn about a tiny, isolated island full of unspoiled beaches. When they arrive, they discover they are not the only visitors and quickly become entangled with a motley crew of expat sailors. Soon, Jake and Virginie’s adventurous dream turns into a terrifying nightmare.
Now, it’s up to Danial to determine just how much truth there is in Virginie’s alarming tale. But when his crew make a shocking discovery, he realizes that if he doesn’t act soon, they could all fall under the dark spell of the island.
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Deep Water
by Patricia Highsmith, Watt Key, Emma Bamford, Maren Stoffels
From the author of Escape Room comes a new pulse-quickening read! How do you outrun danger when you're trapped at sea?
Welcome to No Exit.
The place for you, so that others are safe.
Vesper thought a ten-day cruise would be the perfect escape from her troubled life. But when the ship leaves the harbor, she quickly realizes this is no ordinary vacation. She’s has been enrolled in No Exit, a sinister program to reeducate bullies. Now, Vesper and her fellow passengers are about to confront their darkest fears and deepest regrets.
As the days pass, the ship becomes a floating prison where the rules are brutal and the punishments deadly. With each new challenge, the teens must navigate physical and psychological trials that push them to their limits.
And not everyone will make it back alive.
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Mermaids on the Golf Course: Stories
The great revival of interest in Patricia Highsmith continues with this work that reveals the chilling reality behind the idyllic facade of American suburban life. The stories collected in Mermaids on the Golf Course are among Highsmith's most mature, psychologically penetrating works. As in the title story, in which a man's brush with death endows his everyday desires with tragic consequences, the warm familiarities of middle-class life become the eerie setting for Highsmith's chilling portrayals of violence, secrecy, and madness.
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The Black House
"A border zone of the macabre, the disturbing, the not-quite accidental." ―John Gross, New York Times Book Review
Horrific tragedy becomes disturbingly ordinary in The Black House, a masterful collection of short stories, written during a particularly dark time in Patricia Highsmith's life. As readers will discover, the work eerily evokes the warm familiarities of suburban life: the manicured lawns, the white picket fences, and the local pubs, each providing the backbone for her chilling portraits. Seemingly small indiscretions and infidelities―along with love affairs and murder―consume the characters that commit them. Cycles of destructive jealousy overwhelm the cheating protagonists of "Blow It" and "When in Rome," and the title story explores small-town male camaraderie and the destructive secret it masks. This enthralling collection of eleven stories presents Highsmith at her finest: melancholy, suspenseful, and sizzling with a powerful awareness of human emotion.
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The Price of Salt, or Carol
"A great American writer…Highsmith's writing is wicked…it puts a spell on you." ―Entertainment Weekly
Patricia Highsmith's story of romantic obsession may be one of the most important, but still largely unrecognized, novels of the twentieth century. First published in 1952 and touted as "the novel of a love that society forbids," the book soon became a cult classic.
Based on a true story plucked from Highsmith's own life, The Price of Salt (or Carol) tells the riveting drama of Therese Belivet, a stage designer trapped in a department-store day job, whose routine is forever shattered by a gorgeous epiphany―the appearance of Carol Aird, a customer who comes in to buy her daughter a Christmas toy. Therese begins to gravitate toward the alluring suburban housewife, who is trapped in a marriage as stultifying as Therese's job. They fall in love and set out across the United States, ensnared by society's confines and the imminent disapproval of others, yet propelled by their infatuation. The Price of Salt is a brilliantly written story that may surprise Highsmith fans and will delight those discovering her work.
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The Talented Mr. Ripley
An American classic and the inspiration for the new Netflix series.
It’s here, in the first volume of Patricia Highsmith’s five-book Ripley series, that we are introduced to the suave Tom Ripley, a young striver seeking to leave behind his past as an orphan bullied for being a “sissy.” Newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan, Ripley meets a wealthy industrialist who hires him to bring his playboy son, Dickie Greenleaf, back from gallivanting in Italy. Soon Ripley’s fascination with Dickie’s debonair lifestyle turns obsessive as he finds himself enraged by Dickie’s ambivalent affections for Marge, a charming American dilettante, and Ripley begins a deadly game. “Sinister and strangely alluring” (Mark Harris, Entertainment Weekly) The Talented Mr. Ripley serves as an unforgettable introduction to this smooth confidence man, whose talent for self-invention is as unnerving―and unnervingly revealing of the American psyche―as ever.
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The Talented Mr. Ripley
In a chilling literary hall of mirrors, Patricia Highsmith introduces Tom Ripley. Like a hero in a latter-day Henry James novel, is sent to Italy with a commission to coax a prodigal young American back to his wealthy father. But Ripley finds himself very fond of Dickie Greenleaf. He wants to be like him--exactly like him. Suave, agreeable, and utterly amoral, Ripley stops at nothing--certainly not only one murder--to accomplish his goal. Turning the mystery form inside out, Highsmith shows the terrifying abilities afforded to a man unhindered by the concept of evil.
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The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Under Ground, Ripley's Game (Everyman's Library)
Three classic psychological crime thrillers by a master of the macabre appear here together in hardcover for the first time. THE INSPIRATION FOR THE NETFLIX SERIES STARRING ANDREW SCOTT, JOHNNY FLYNN, AND DAKOTA FANNING.
Suave, agreeable, and completely amoral, Patricia Highsmith's hero, the inimitable Tom Ripley, stops at nothing--not even murder--to accomplish his goals. In achieving for himself the opulent life that he was denied as a child, Ripley shows himself to be a master of illusion and manipulation and a disturbingly sympathetic combination of genius and psychopath. As Highsmith navigates the mesmerizing tangle of Ripley's deadly and sinister games, she turns the mystery genre inside out and takes us into the mind of a man utterly indifferent to evil.
The Talented Mr. Ripley - ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE'S 100 BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ALL TIME
In a chilling literary hall of mirrors, Patricia Highsmith introduces Tom Ripley. Like a hero in a latter-day Henry James novel, Ripley is sent to Italy with a commission to coax a prodigal young American back to his wealthy father. But Ripley finds himself very fond of Dickie Greenleaf. He wants to be like him--exactly like him. Suave, agreeable, and utterly amoral, Ripley stops at nothing--certainly not only one murder--to accomplish his goal. Turning the mystery form inside out, Highsmith shows the terrifying abilities afforded to a man unhindered by the concept of evil.
Ripley Under Ground
In this harrowing illumination of the psychotic mind, the enviable Tom Ripley has a lovely house in the French countryside, a beautiful and very rich wife, and an art collection worthy of a connoisseur. But such a gracious life has not come easily. One inopportune inquiry, one inconvenient friend, and Ripley's world will come tumbling down--unless he takes decisive steps. In a mesmerizing novel that coolly subverts all traditional notions of literary justice, Ripley enthralls us even as we watch him perform acts of pure and unspeakable evil.
Ripley's Game
Connoisseur of art, harpsichord aficionado, gardener extraordinaire, and genius of improvisational murder, the inimitable Tom Ripley finds his complacency shaken when he is scorned at a posh gala. While an ordinary psychopath might repay the insult with some mild act of retribution, what Ripley has in mind is far more subtle, and infinitely more sinister. A social slight doesn't warrant murder of course--just a chain of events that may lead to it.
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The Complete Ripley Novels
Collected here in this stunning, boxed-set edition, The Complete Ripley Novels celebrates one of fiction’s most iconic literary characters. First published in 2008, The Complete Ripley Novels, brilliantly designed in a handsome slipcase, sold out its initial run. This collector’s item, featuring all five classic Ripley novels―The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Under Ground, Ripley’s Game, The Boy Who Followed Ripley, and Ripley Under Water―returns with a new printing on the twentieth anniversary of Patricia Highsmith’s death in 1995. The Highsmith literary renaissance, initially sparked by a 1999 film adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley―which introduced fans and new readers alike to the unforgettable Tom Ripley, the debonair confidence man with a talent for self-invention and murder―continues in full force with three major Highsmith movies in the offing as well as the republication of this volume, “the most sinister and strangely alluring quintet the crime fiction genre has ever produced” (Entertainment Weekly).
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The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith
The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith presents five of Highsmith's classic short story collections in a single masterful volume. Compelling, twisted, and fiercely intelligent, this landmark collection showcases Highsmith's mastery of the short story form. In a cruel twist of irony, Texas-born Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995) is being recognized only after her death for her inestimable genius in her native land. With the savage humor of Waugh and the macabre sensibility of Poe, she brought a distinctly contemporary acuteness to her prolific body of noir fiction. Including over 60 short stories written throughout her career, collected together for the first time, The Selected Stories reveals the stunning versatility and terrifying power of Highsmith's work.
These stories highlight the remarkable range of Highsmith's powers her unique ability to quickly, almost imperceptibly, draw out the mystery and strangeness of her subject, which appears achingly ordinary to our naked eye. Whether writing about jaded wives or household pets, Highsmith continually upsets our expectations and presents a world frighteningly familiar to our own, where danger lurks around every turn. Stories from The Animal-Lovers Book of Beastly Murders portray, with incisive humor, the murderously competitive desires of our most trusted companions. In this viciously satirical reprise of Kafka, cats, dogs, and cockroaches are no longer necessary aspects of a happy home but actually have the power to destroy it. In the short sketches that make up the Little Tales of Misogyny, Highsmith rediscovers predictable female characters "The Dancer," "The Female Novelist," "The Prude" and, through scathing humor, invests them with uniquely destructive powers. As a writer, Highsmith was all too well aware of the stolid patriarchal conventions that ruled her day her publisher rejected her second book out of hand because of its homosexual content. She is not a polemicist, but, as stories like "Oona the Jolly Cave Woman" and "The Mobile Bed-Object" reveal, her bizarre, haunting fiction continually betrays the inadequacy of our conventional understanding of female character. Highsmith eventually moved away from these coolly satiric, darkly comic exercises, and in her later collections, The Black House, Slowly, Slowly in the Wind, and Mermaids on the Golf Course, she uses the warm familiarities of middle-class life the manicured lawns, the cozy uptown apartments, the local pubs as the backbone for her chilling portrayals. "The Black House," for instance, explores the small-town male camaraderie and the destructive secret it masks: in this world, the fact that everyone knows your name is more likely a curse than a blessing. In the title story of the final collection presented here, "Mermaids on a Golf-Course," a man's extraordinary brush with death endows his everyday desires with fantastically devastating consequences. In her later work, Highsmith adds a dimension of penetrating psychological insight, evoked most vividly in stories like "A Curious Suicide" and "The Stuff of Madness," where the precarious line between fantasy and reality is blurred and we experience the terrifying possibility of slipping between them. Great writers view the world askew, and in their art they reflect our world back to us, slightly distorted.
The Selected Stories reveals Highsmith's deft and exacting style, her incisive satirical intelligence, and her faultless eye for depicting the inner tremblings of human character. Her world remains all the more frightening because we recognize it as our own.
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Patricia Highsmith: Selected Novels and Short Stories
"Patricia Highsmith's novels are peerlessly disturbing . . . bad dreams that keep us thrashing for the rest of the night."―The New Yorker The remarkable renaissance of Patricia Highsmith continues with the publication of Patricia Highsmith: Selected Novels and Short Stories, featuring two groundbreaking novels as well as a trove of penetrating short stories. With a critical introduction by Joan Schenkar, situating Highsmith's classic works within her own tumultuous life, this book provides a useful guide to some of her most dazzlingly seductive writing. Strangers on a Train (1950), transformed into a legendary film by Alfred Hitchcock, displays Highsmith's genius for psychological characterization and tortuous suspense, while The Price of Salt (1952), with its lesbian lovers and a creepy PI, provides a thrilling and highly controversial depiction of "the love that dare not speak its name." Patricia Highsmith: Selected Novels and Short Stories firmly establishes Highsmith's centrality to American culture by presenting key works that went on to influence a half-century of literature and film. Abandoned by the wider reading public in her lifetime, Highsmith finally gets the canonical recognition that is her due.
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Strangers on a Train: A Novel
"Strangers on a Train has lost none of its power to disturb…We will likely be reading Patricia Highsmith for the next one hundred years." ―Paula Hawkins Just in time for the centennial celebration of groundbreaking noir fiction writer Patricia Highsmith comes a reissue of her propulsive, engrossing debut, Strangers on a Train, with a new introduction by best-selling author Paula Hawkins. Guy Haines and Charles Anthony Bruno are passengers on the same train. Haines is a successful architect in the midst of a divorce, Bruno a mysterious smooth-talker with a sadistic proposal: he’ll murder Haines’s wife if Haines will murder Bruno’s father. As Bruno carries out his twisted plan, Guy finds himself trapped in Highsmith’s perilous world, where, under the right circumstances, ordinary people are capable of extraordinary crimes. The inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1951 film, Strangers on a Train launched Highsmith’s prolific career, proving her a master at depicting the unsettling forces that tremble beneath the surface of everyday life.
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Carol (Movie Tie-in Editions)
"A great American writer…Highsmith's writing is wicked…it puts a spell on you." ―Entertainment Weekly
Now a major motion picture.
Patricia Highsmith's story of romantic obsession may be one of the most important, but still largely unrecognized, novels of the twentieth century. First published in 1952 and touted as "the novel of a love that society forbids," the book soon became a cult classic.
Based on a true story plucked from Highsmith's own life, Carol tells the riveting drama of Therese Belivet, a stage designer trapped in a department-store day job, whose routine is forever shattered by a gorgeous epiphany―the appearance of Carol Aird, a customer who comes in to buy her daughter a Christmas toy. Therese begins to gravitate toward the alluring suburban housewife, who is trapped in a marriage as stultifying as Therese's job. They fall in love and set out across the United States, ensnared by society's confines and the imminent disapproval of others, yet propelled by their infatuation. Carol is a brilliantly written story that may surprise Highsmith fans and will delight those discovering her work.
This authorized edition includes an afterword by Patricia Highsmith. Previously titled The Price of Salt.
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The Boy Who Followed Ripley
"Ripley is an unmistakable descendant of Gatsby, that 'penniless young man without a past' who will stop at nothing." ―Frank Rich
The Boy Who Followed Ripley, the fourth novel in the Ripley series, is one of Patricia Highsmith's darkest and most twisted creations. Tom Ripley meets a young American runaway who has a dark secret that he is desperate to hide. Soon this unlikely pair is drawn into the seamy underworld of Berlin and a shocking kidnapping. In this masterful thriller, Highsmith shatters our perceptions of her most famous creation by letting us glimpse a more compassionate side of this amoral charmer.
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Ripley Under Ground
"Ripley is an unmistakable descendant of Gatsby, that 'penniless young man without a past' who will stop at nothing."―Frank Rich Now part of American film and literary lore, Tom Ripley, "a bisexual psychopath and art forger who murders without remorse when his comforts are threatened" (New York Times Book Review), was Patricia Highsmith's favorite creation. In these volumes, we find Ripley ensconced on a French estate with a wealthy wife, a world-class art collection, and a past to hide. In Ripley Under Ground (1970), an art forgery goes awry and Ripley is threatened with exposure; in The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980), Highsmith explores Ripley's bizarrely paternal relationship with a troubled young runaway, whose abduction draws them into Berlin's seamy underworld; and in Ripley Under Water (1991), Ripley is confronted by a snooping American couple obsessed with the disappearance of an art collector who visited Ripley years before. More than any other American literary character, Ripley provides "a lens to peer into the sinister machinations of human behavior" (John Freeman, Pittsburgh Gazette).
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Ripley's Game
With its sinister humor and genius plotting, Ripley's Game is an enduring portrait of a compulsive, sociopathic American antihero.
Living on his posh French estate with his elegant heiress wife, Tom Ripley, on the cusp of middle age, is no longer the striving comer of The Talented Mr. Ripley. Having accrued considerable wealth through a long career of crime―forgery, extortion, serial murder―Ripley still finds his appetite unquenched and longs to get back in the game.
In Ripley's Game, first published in 1974, Patricia Highsmith's classic chameleon relishes the opportunity to simultaneously repay an insult and help a friend commit a crime―and escape the doldrums of his idyllic retirement. This third novel in Highsmith's series is one of her most psychologically nuanced―particularly memorable for its dark, absurd humor―and was hailed by critics for its ability to manipulate the tropes of the genre. With the creation of Ripley, one of literature's most seductive sociopaths, Highsmith anticipated the likes of Norman Bates and Hannibal Lecter years before their appearance.
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Ripley's Game
Connoisseur of art, harpsichord aficionado, gardener extraordinaire, and genius of improvisational murder, the inimitable Tom Ripley finds his complacency shaken when he is scorned at a posh gala. While an ordinary psychopath might repay the insult with some mild act of retribution, what Ripley has in mind is far more subtle, and infinitely more sinister. A social slight doesn't warrant murder of course-- just a chain of events that may lead to it.
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Little Tales of Misogyny
"These stories, once you get the hang of them, are very wicked, very funny and―this being Highsmith’s mission in life, as far as one can tell―very unsettling." ―The Guardian
With an eerie simplicity of style, Highsmith turns our next-door neighbors into sadistic psychopaths, lying in wait among white picket fences and manicured lawns. In the darkly satiric, often mordantly hilarious sketches that make up Little Tales of Misogyny, Highsmith upsets our conventional notions of female character, revealing the devastating power of these once familiar creatures―"The Dancer," "The Female Novelist," "The Prude"―who destroy both themselves and the men around them. This work attests to Highsmith's reputation as "the poet of apprehension" (Graham Greene).
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Strangers on a Train
"For eliciting the menace that lurks in familiar surroundings, there's no one like Patricia Highsmith." ―Time
The world of Patricia Highsmith has always been filled with ordinary people, all of whom are capable of very ordinary crimes. This theme was present from the beginning, when her debut, Strangers on a Train, galvanized the reading public. Here we encounter Guy Haines and Charles Anthony Bruno, passengers on the same train. But while Guy is a successful architect in the midst of a divorce, Bruno turns out to be a sadistic psychopath who manipulates Guy into swapping murders with him. "Some people are better off dead," Bruno remarks, "like your wife and my father, for instance." As Bruno carries out his twisted plan, Guy is trapped in Highsmith's perilous world, where, under the right circumstances, anybody is capable of murder.
The inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock's classic 1951 film, Strangers on a Train launched Highsmith on a prolific career of noir fiction, proving her a master at depicting the unsettling forces that tremble beneath the surface of everyday contemporary life.
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The Two Faces of January
[A] classic psychological thriller.”USA Today
Originally published in 1964, and the winner of the CWA Best Foreign Novel Award, Patricia Highsmith’s The Two Faces of January is a chilling tale of suspense, suffused with her trademark slow, creeping unease.
In a grubby Athens hotel, Rydal Keener is bored and killing time with petty scams. But when he runs into another American, Chester MacFarland, dragging a man’s body down the hotel hall, Rydan impulsively agrees to help, perhaps because Chester looks like his father. Then Rydal meets Collete, Chester’s younger wife, and captivated, becomes entangled in their sordid lives, as the drama marches to a shocking climax at the ruins of the labyrinth at Knossos.
A film version of The Two Faces of January, starring Viggo Mortensen, Kirsten Dunst, and Oscar Isaac (Drive, Inside Llewelyn Davis) is in production. Adapted by Academy Award nominee Hossein Amini (Drive), and produced by Working Title and Timnick Films (The Talented Mr. Ripley), it will be released later this fall.
An offbeat, provocative and absorbing suspense novel.”The New York Times
Patricia Highsmith is one of the few suspense writers whose work transcends genre.”The Austin American-Statesman
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A Game for the Living
Ramón, a devout Catholic, fixes furniture in Mexico City, not far from where he was born into poverty. Theodore, a rich German expatriate and painter, believes in nothing at all. You’d think the two had nothing in common. Except, of course, that both had slept with Lelia. Two form an unlikely friendship, until Lelia is found brutally murdered. Both are suspects and each suspects the other.
Twisting in a limbo of tension and doubt, Ramón and Theodore seize on a third man, a thief seen at Lelia’s apartment, and their hunt takes them from Mexico City to the sundrenched Acapulco, and to a small colonial mountain town. A thrilling, psychologically complex novel, rich with setting, A Game for the Living is Highsmith at her best.
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Found in the Street
Fabulous, in all senses of that word . . . combining the best features of the suspense genre with the best of existential fictiona thrilled reflection.”Paul Theroux
Elsie Tyler turns heads wherever she goes. After leaving her hometown upstate for Greenwich Village, the charming young waitress soon finds herself surrounded by admirers, including Jack and Natalia Sutherland, a married couple who invite Elsie into their bohemian inner circle and help her launch a career as a model. Meanwhile, Ralph Linderman, a middle-aged security guard with a dog named God, is nursing his own obsession with Elsie. He sets out to protect her from the bad company” she attracts, but his uninvited affections are overbearing, possibly even pathological. When Ralph finds Jack’s wallet on a morning stroll through the Village, and returns it, he is entirely unprepared for the complex maze of sexual obsession and disturbing psychological intrigue he is about to be drawn into.
Originally published in 1986, Found in the Street is classic Highsmithan engrossing, unsettling thriller that explores the bleakest alleyways of human desire, and a kaleidoscopic portrait of 1980s New York City. Patricia Highsmith, author of Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley, has been called one of the finest crime novelists” by the New York Times and is now considered one of the most original voices in twentieth-century American fiction.
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Those Who Walk Away
Ray Garrett, a wealthy young American living in Europe, is grieving over the death of his wife, Peggy. Ray is at a loss for why she would take her own life, but Peggy’s father, Ed Coleman, a painter, has no such uncertainty―he blames Ray completely. Late one night in Rome, Coleman shoots Ray at point-blank range. He thinks he’s had his revenge, but Ray survives and follows Coleman and his wealthy girlfriend to Venice.
In Venice, it happens again: Coleman attacks his loathed son-in-law, dumping him into the cold waters of the Laguna. Ray survives thanks to the help of a boatman, and this time he goes into hiding, living in a privately rented room under a fake name. So begins an eerie game of cat and mouse. Coleman wants vengeance, Ray wants a clear conscience, and the police want to solve the mystery of what happened to the missing American.
As Ray and Coleman stalk each other through the narrow streets and canals, the hotels and bars of the beguiling city, Those Who Walk Away simmers with violence and unease. Originally published in 1967, this is vintage Highsmith.
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Edith's Diary
Edith Howland’s diary is her most precious possession. After moving with her family from New York City to suburban Pennsylvania, Edith’s husband abandons her for a younger woman, leaving her trapped in a bleak existence with her degenerate son and his senile uncle. As Edith’s life turns sour, she retreats into her writing; and while her life plunges into chaos, a disturbing tale of success and happiness blooms in her diary. She invents a happy life, and as she knits for imaginary grandchildren, the real world recedes further still, marking a descent into madness that may well be unstoppable.
Originally published in 1977, Edith’s Diary is a masterpiece of psychological suspense, a harrowing and tautly written tale of an ordinary woman whose life is slipping out of control. The author of Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith is one of the most original voices in twentieth-century American fiction.
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Edith's Diary
As Edith Howland's life becomes harsh, her diary entries only become brighter and brighter. She invents a happy life. As she knits for imaginary grandchildren, the real world recedes. Her descent into madness is subtle, appalling, and entirely believable.
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The Tremor of Forgery
The Tremor of Forgery is considered by many to be Patricia Highsmith's finest novel. Set in Tunisia in the mid-1960s, it is the story of Howard Ingham, an American writer who has gone abroad to gather material for a movie too sordid to be set in America. Ingham is cool towards Ina, the girlfriend he left behind in New York, but his feelings start to change when she doesn't answer his increasingly aggravated letters, and John Castlewood, the filmmaker who hired Ingham, fails to show in Tunisia. Amid the tea shops and alleys of the souk, the sun-blasted architecture, and the beaches and hotels frequented by international tourists, will Ingham’s morality survive the withering heat? Includes an introduction by Francine Prose.
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The Cry of the Owl
In a small Pennsylvania town, Robert Forrester is recuperating from a nasty divorce and a bout of psychological trouble. One evening, while driving home, he sees a pretty young woman framed by her bright kitchen window. Soon, he can’t keep himself away. But when Robert is inevitably discovered, obsession is turned on its head, and he finds himself unable to shake the young woman, nor entirely sure whether he should. Recently made into a major motion picture starring Julia Stiles and Paddy Considine, The Cry of the Owl is essential Highsmith, a modern classic ready to be reborn.
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Eleven
by Patricia Reilly Giff, Patricia Highsmith
Sam is almost 11 when he discovers a locked box in the attic above his grandfather Mack’s room, and a piece of paper that says he was kidnapped. There are lots of other words, but Sam has always had trouble reading. He’s desperate to find out who he is, and if his beloved Mack is really his grandfather. At night he’s haunted by dreams of a big castle and a terrifying escape on a boat. Who can he trust to help him read the documents that could unravel the mystery? Then he and the new girl, Caroline, are paired up to work on a school project, building a castle in Mack’s woodworking shop. Caroline loves to read, and she can help. But she’s moving soon, and the two must hurry to discover the truth about Sam.
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Eleven
by Patricia Reilly Giff, Patricia Highsmith
Sam must solve the mystery of who he really is.
Sam is almost 11 when he discovers a locked box in the attic above his grandfather Mack’s room, and a piece of paper that says he was kidnapped. There are lots of other words, but Sam has always had trouble reading. He’s desperate to find out who he is, and if his beloved Mack is really his grandfather. At night he’s haunted by dreams of a big castle and a terrifying escape on a boat. Who can he trust to help him read the documents that could unravel the mystery? Then he and the new girl, Caroline, are paired up to work on a school project, building a castle in Mack’s woodworking shop. Caroline loves to read, and she can help. But she’s moving soon, and the two must hurry to discover the truth about Sam.
★ “This psychological mystery explores a child’s deepest genetic need for belonging. An engrossing examination of a profound theme in the deft hands of a discerning author.”—Kirkus Reviews, Starred
★ “Exquisitely rendered story of self-discovery. . . . Given the author’s expertise at developing sympathetic characters and creating a suspenseful plot, readers will find the complexity of Sam’ vulnerabilities to be as
intriguing as the unfolding enigma of his past.”—Publishers Weekly, Starred
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Eleven
by Patricia Reilly Giff, Patricia Highsmith
From the eerily outlandish to the dark and brutal, Eleven presents a gallery of bizarre characters, each driven by strange unspoken urges, whose cumulative effect is at least as unsettling as any of Highsmith's previous novels.
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Eleven
by Patricia Reilly Giff, Patricia Highsmith
The legendary writer Patricia Highsmith is best remembered today for her chilling psychological thrillers The Talented Mr. Ripley and Strangers on a Train. A critically acclaimed best seller in Europe, Highsmith has for too long been underappreciated in the United States. Starting in 2011, Grove Press will begin to reissue nine of Highsmith’s works. Eleven is Highsmith’s first collection of short stories, an arresting group of dark masterpieces of obsession and foreboding, violence and instability. Here naturalists meet gruesome ends and unhinged heroes disturb our sympathies. This is a captivating, important collection from one of the truly brilliant short-story writers of the twentieth century” (Otto Penzler). Includes an introduction by Graham Greene.
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Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes
The legendary writer Patricia Highsmith is best remembered today for her chilling psychological thrillers The Talented Mr. Ripley and Strangers on a Train, which was made into the classic film by Alfred Hitchcock and Raymond Chandler. A critically-acclaimed best seller in Europe, Highsmith struggled during her life for recognition in the United States, but since her death in 1995 Highsmith’s reputation has grown tremendously, and she is now recognized as one of the signature voices of the troubled twentieth century. When the dust has settled,” critic A.N. Wilson wrote, and when the chronicle of twentieth-century American literature comes to be written, history will place Highsmith at the top of the pyramid, as we should place Dostoevsky at the top of the Russian hierarchy of novelists.”
Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes is the last short fiction published during Highsmith's lifetime. The ten eerily up-to-date stories chronicle a world gone slightly mad; environmental degradation, apocalyptic disaster, political chaos, and religious conservatism are captured in incisive prose that leaves us haunted with afterimages that will tremblebut stayin our minds” (The New Yorker).
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Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941-1995
New York Times • Times Critics Top Books of 2021
The Times (of London) • Best Books of the Year
Excerpted in The New Yorker
Profiled in The Los Angeles Times Publishing for the centenary of her birth, Patricia Highsmith’s diaries “offer the most complete picture ever published” of the canonical author (New York Times).
Relegated to the genre of mystery during her lifetime, Patricia Highsmith is now recognized as one of “our greatest modernist writers” (Gore Vidal). Beloved by fans who were unaware of the real psychological turmoil behind her prose, the famously secretive Highsmith refused to authorize a biography, instead sequestering herself in her Switzerland home in her final years. Posthumously, her devoted editor Anna von Planta discovered her diaries and notebooks in 1995, tucked in a closet―with tantalizing instructions to be read.
For years thereafter, von Planta meticulously culled from over eight thousand pages to help reveal the inscrutable figure behind the legendary pen. Beginning with her junior year at Barnard in 1941, Highsmith ritualistically kept a diary and notebook―the former to catalog her day, the latter to brainstorm stories and hone her craft. This volume weaves diary and notebook simultaneously, exhibiting precisely how Highsmith’s personal affairs seeped into her fiction―and the sheer darkness of her own imagination.
Charming yet teetering on the egotistical, young “Pat” lays bare her dizzying social life in 1940s Greenwich Village, barhopping with Judy Holliday and Jane Bowles, among others. Alongside Flannery O’Conner and Chester Himes, she attended―at the recommendation of Truman Capote―the Yaddo artist colony in 1948, where she drafted Strangers on a Train. Published in 1950 and soon adapted by Alfred Hitchcock, this debut novel brought recognition and brief financial security, but left a heartsick Highsmith agonizing: “What is the life I choose?”
Providing extraordinary insights into gender and sexuality in mid-twentieth-century America, Highsmith’s diaries convey her euphoria writing The Price of Salt (1951). Yet her sophomore novel would have to be published under a pseudonym, so as not to tarnish her reputation. Indeed, no one could anticipate commercial reception for a novel depicting love between two women in the McCarthy era. Seeking relief from America, Highsmith catalogs her peripatetic years in Europe, subsisting on cigarettes and growing more bigoted and satirical with age. After a stay in Positano with a new lover, she reflects in her notebooks on being an expat, and gleefully conjures the unforgettable The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955); it would be this sociopathic antihero who would finally solidify her true fame.
At once lovable, detestable, and mesmerizing, Highsmith put her turbulent life to paper for five decades, acutely aware there must be “a few usable things in literature.” A memoir as significant in our own century as Sylvia Plath’s journals and Simone de Beauvoir’s writings were to another time, Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks is an historic work that chronicles a woman’s rise against the conventional tide to unparalleled literary prominence. 5 illustrations
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Women Crime Writers: Four Suspense Novels of the 1950s (LOA #269): Mischief / The Blunderer / Beast in View / Fools' Gold (Library of America Women Crime Writers Collection)
by Patricia Highsmith, Charlotte Armstrong, Margaret Millar, Dolores Hitchens
The Real Lolita author Sarah Weinman presents a landmark collection of 4 brilliant novels by the female pioneers of crime fiction—women who paved the way for Gillian Flynn, Tana French, and Lisa Scottoline
Though women crime and suspense writers dominate today’s bestseller lists, the extraordinary work of the mid-century pioneers of the genre is largely unknown. Turning in many cases from the mean streets of the hardboiled school to explore the anxieties and terrors lurking in everyday life, these groundbreaking novelists found the roots of fear and violence in a quiet suburban neighborhood, on a college campus, or in a comfortable midtown hotel. Their work, influential in its day and still vibrant and extraordinarily riveting today, is long overdue for rediscovery.
This volume, the second of a two-volume collector’s set, gathers four classic works that together reveal the vital and unacknowledged lineage to today’s leading crime writers. From the 1950s here are Charlotte Armstrong’s Mischief, the nightmarish drama of a child entrusted to a psychotic babysitter, Patricia Highsmith’s The Blunderer, brilliantly tracking the perverse parallel lives of two men driven toward murder, Margaret Millar’s Beast in View, a relentless study in madness, and Dolores Hitchens’s Fools' Gold, a hard-edged tale of robbery and redemption.
LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
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Crime Novels: Four Classic Thrillers 1964-1969 (LOA #371): The Fiend / Doll / Run Man Run / The Tremor of Forgery (Library of America, 371)
by Patricia Highsmith, Ed McBain, Chester Himes, Margaret Millar
In the 1960s the masters of crime fiction expanded the genre’s literary and psychological possibilities with audacious new themes, forms, and subject matter—here are four of their finest works
This is the second of two volumes gathering the best American crime fiction of the 1960s, nine novels of astonishing variety and inventiveness that pulse with the energies of that turbulent, transformative decade.
In Margaret Millar’s The Fiend (1964) a nine-year-old girl disappears and a local sex offender comes under suspicion. So begins a suspenseful investigation of an apparently tranquil California suburb which will expose a hidden tangle of fear and animosity, jealousy and desperation.
Ed McBain (a pen name of Evan Hunter) pioneered the multi-protagonist police procedural in his long-running series of 87th Precinct novels, set in a parallel Manhattan called Isola. Doll (1965) opens at a pitch of extreme violence and careens with breakneck speed through a tale that mixes murder, drugs, the modeling business, and psychotherapy with the everyday professionalism of McBain’s harried cops.
The racial paranoia of a drunken police detective in Run Man Run(1966) leads to a double murder and the relentless pursuit of the young Black college student who witnessed it. In Chester Himes’s breathless narrative, New York City is a place with no safe havens for a fugitive whom no one wants to believe.
In Patricia Highsmith’s The Tremor of Forgery (1969) a man whose personality is disintegrating is writing a book called The Tremor of Forgery about a man whose personality is disintegrating, “like a mountain collapsing from within.” Stranded unexpectedly in Tunisia, Howard Ingham struggles to hold on to himself in a strange locale, while a slightly damaged typewriter may be the only trace of a killing committed almost by accident.
Volume features include an introduction by editor Geoffrey O'Brien (Hardboiled America), newly researched biographies of the writers and helpful notes, and an essay on textual selection.
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Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s: The Killer Inside Me / The Talented Mr. Ripley / Pick-up / Down There / The Real Cool Killers (Library of America)
by Jim Thompson, Patricia Highsmith, Charles Willeford, David Goodis, Robert Polito, Chester Himes
This adventurous two-volume collection presents a rich vein of modern American writing too often neglected in mainstream literary histories. Evolving out of the terse and violent hardboiled style of the pulp magazines, noir fiction expanded over the decades into a varied and innovative body of writing. Tapping deep roots in the American literary imagination, the novels in this volume explore themes of crime, guilt, deception, obsessive passion, murder, and the disintegrating psyche. With visionary and often subversive force they create a dark and violent mythology out of the most commonplace elements of modern life. The raw power of their vernacular style has profoundly influenced contemporary American culture and writing.
LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
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Ripley Under Water
"Ripley is an unmistakable descendant of Gatsby, that 'penniless young man without a past' who will stop at nothing."—Frank Rich
Now part of American film and literary lore, Tom Ripley, "a bisexual psychopath and art forger who murders without remorse when his comforts are threatened" (New York Times Book Review), was Patricia Highsmith's favorite creation. In these volumes, we find Ripley ensconced on a French estate with a wealthy wife, a world-class art collection, and a past to hide. In Ripley Under Ground (1970), an art forgery goes awry and Ripley is threatened with exposure; in The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980), Highsmith explores Ripley's bizarrely paternal relationship with a troubled young runaway, whose abduction draws them into Berlin's seamy underworld; and in Ripley Under Water (1991), Ripley is confronted by a snooping American couple obsessed with the disappearance of an art collector who visited Ripley years before. More than any other American literary character, Ripley provides "a lens to peer into the sinister machinations of human behavior" (John Freeman, Pittsburgh Gazette).
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Small g: A Summer Idyll
"Like Ripley, [Highsmith's characters] burn in a reader's memory."―Susan Salters Reynolds, Los Angeles Times Book Review In unmistakable Highsmithian fashion, Small g, Patricia Highsmith's final novel, opens near a seedy Zurich bar with the brutal murder of Petey Ritter. Unraveling the vagaries of love, sexuality, jealousy, and death, Highsmith weaves a mystery both hilarious and astonishing, a classic fairy tale executed with a characteristic penchant for darkness. Published in paperback for the first time in America, Small g is at once an exorcism of Highsmith's literary demons and a revelatory capstone to a wholly remarkable career. It is a delightfully incantatory work that, in the tradition of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, shows us how bizarre and unpredictable love can be.
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The Blunderer
"Highsmith's novels are peerlessly disturbing...bad dreams that keep us thrashing for the rest of the night." ―The New Yorker
For two years, Walter Stackhouse has been a faithful and supportive husband to his wife, Clara. She is distant and neurotic, and Walter finds himself harboring gruesome fantasies about her demise. When Clara's dead body turns up at the bottom of a cliff in a manner uncannily resembling the recent death of a woman named Helen Kimmel who was murdered by her husband, Walter finds himself under intense scrutiny. He commits several blunders that claim his career and his reputation, cost him his friends, and eventually threaten his life. The Blunderer examines the dark obsessions that lie beneath the surface of seemingly ordinary people. With unerring psychological insight, Patricia Highsmith portrays characters who cross the precarious line separating fantasy from reality.
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A Suspension of Mercy
A major new reissue of the work of a classic noir novelist. With the acclaim for The Talented Mr. Ripley, more film projects in production, and two biographies forthcoming, expatriate legend Patricia Highsmith would be shocked to see that she has finally arrived in her homeland. Throughout her career, Highsmith brought a keen literary eye and a genius for plumbing the psychopathic mind to more than thirty works of fiction, unparalleled in their placid deviousness and sardonic humor. With deadpan accuracy, she delighted in creating true sociopaths in the guise of the everyday man or woman. Now, one of her finest works is again in print: A Suspension of Mercy, a masterpiece of noir fantasy. With this novel, Highsmith revels in eliciting the unsettling psychological forces that lurk beneath the surface of everyday contemporary life. "For eliciting the menace that lurks in familiar surroundings, there's no one like Patricia Highsmith."―Time "Highsmith's novels are peerlessly disturbing ....bad dreams that keep us thrashing for the rest of the night."―The New Yorker
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Slowly, Slowly in the Wind
"Highsmith's writing is wicked . . . it puts a spell on you, after which you feel altered, even tainted."―Entertainment Weekly
Slowly, Slowly in the Wind brilliantly assembles many of Patricia Highsmith's most nuanced and psychologically suspenseful works. Rarely has an author articulated so well the hypocrisies of the Catholic Church while conveying the delusions of a writer's life and undermining the fantasy of suburban bliss. Each of these twelve pieces, like all great short fiction, is a crystal-clear snapshot of lives both static and full of chaos. In "The Pond" Highsmith explores the unforeseen calamities that can unalterably shatter a single woman's life, while "The Network" finds sinister loneliness and joy in the mundane yet engrossing friendships of a small community of urban dwellers. In this enduring and disturbing collection, Highsmith evokes the gravity and horror of her characters' surroundings with evenhanded prose and a detailed imagination.
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Patricia Highsmith's Diaries and Notebooks The New York Years, 1941-1950
Essential for understanding Patricia Highsmith’s transgressive life and prophetic work, this volume is also “one of the most observant and ecstatic accounts . . . about being young and alive in New York City” (Dwight Garner,—New York Times).
Before Alfred Hitchcock adapted her debut novel, Strangers on a Train, for the big screen; before her suave and sociopathic Thomas Ripley snaked his way into the canon of psychological suspense; and before The Price of Salt became a cult classic of romantic obsession, who was Patricia Highsmith?
Focused on her formative years in Manhattan, this condensed edition of Highsmith’s monumental Diaries and Notebooks reveals “Pat” at her most passionate and florescent. Beginning in 1941 at Barnard College and encompassing the Texas native’s adventurous twenties,?The New York Years intertwines scenes from her dizzying social life—rife with sleepless nights barhopping in the queer underground Greenwich Village scene, always juggling too many lovers—with an intimate self-portrait of a young artist who by day dispassionately wrote comics for a paycheck. Amid all the hangovers and the breakups, she read voraciously and honed her craft with verve. Laid bare in this perennial reader’s edition are the bold, hilarious, romantic, tragic, and maddeningly contradictory observations of one of “our greatest modernist writers” (Gore Vidal).
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