Patricia Highsmith - Free Library Land Online

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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.]]> Tue, 18 Oct 1977 12:43:24 +0300 Those Who Walk Away https://reference.library.land/patricia-highsmith/45369-those_who_walk_away.html https://reference.library.land/patricia-highsmith/45369-those_who_walk_away.html

The honeymoon is over, as they say, the bride dead by her own hand. Ray Garrett, the grieving husband, convinces the police in Rome of his innocence, but not his thuggish father-in-law, an American painter named Ed Coleman, who shoots him at point-blank range and leaves him for dead. Ray survives, however, and follows Coleman to Venice, where the two fall into an eerie game of cat-and-mouse—Coleman obsessed with vengeance and Ray equally insistent on clearing his conscience, though each is at once the hunter and the hunted in a duel composed of tension, hiding, and guessing, and at times punctuated by violence that, even as each manages to walk away, draws them nearer to death.]]> Wed, 14 Sep 1977 21:47:48 +0300 Eleven https://reference.library.land/patricia-highsmith/45360-eleven.html https://reference.library.land/patricia-highsmith/45360-eleven.html Eleven

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. ]]> Wed, 14 Sep 1977 21:47:48 +0300 The Black House https://reference.library.land/patricia-highsmith/45368-the_black_house.html https://reference.library.land/patricia-highsmith/45368-the_black_house.html

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.]]> Sun, 18 Oct 1981 12:43:24 +0300 The Boy Who Followed Ripley https://reference.library.land/patricia-highsmith/45347-the_boy_who_followed_ripley.html https://reference.library.land/patricia-highsmith/45347-the_boy_who_followed_ripley.html

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. "Ripley is an unmistakable descendant of Gatsby, that 'penniless young man without a past' who will stop at nothing."
—Frank Rich, New York Times Magazine]]> Sat, 18 Oct 1980 12:43:21 +0300 Ripley's Game https://reference.library.land/patricia-highsmith/45356-ripleys_game.html https://reference.library.land/patricia-highsmith/45356-ripleys_game.html

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.]]> Wed, 14 Sep 1977 21:47:48 +0300 People Who Knock on the Door https://reference.library.land/patricia-highsmith/45351-people_who_knock_on_the_door.html https://reference.library.land/patricia-highsmith/45351-people_who_knock_on_the_door.html

With the savage humor of Evelyn Waugh and the macabre sensibility of Edgar Allan Poe, Patricia Highsmith brought a distinct twentieth-century acuteness to her prolific body of fiction. In her more than twenty novels, psychopaths lie in wait amid the milieu of the mundane, in the neighbor clipping the hedges or the spouse asleep next to you at night. Now, Norton continues the revival of this noir genius with another of her lost masterpieces: a later work from 1983, People Who Knock on the Door, is a tale about blind faith and the slippery notion of justice that lies beneath the peculiarly American veneer of righteousness. This novel, out of print for years, again attests to Highsmith's reputation as "the poet of apprehension" (Graham Greene).]]> Tue, 18 Oct 1983 12:43:21 +0300 A Suspension of Mercy https://reference.library.land/patricia-highsmith/45357-a_suspension_of_mercy.html https://reference.library.land/patricia-highsmith/45357-a_suspension_of_mercy.html

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]]> Wed, 14 Sep 1977 21:47:48 +0300 Mermaids on the Golf Course: Stories https://reference.library.land/patricia-highsmith/45348-mermaids_on_the_golf_course_stories.html https://reference.library.land/patricia-highsmith/45348-mermaids_on_the_golf_course_stories.html

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.]]> Thu, 18 Oct 1984 12:43:21 +0300 Slowly, Slowly in the Wind https://reference.library.land/patricia-highsmith/45345-slowly_slowly_in_the_wind.html https://reference.library.land/patricia-highsmith/45345-slowly_slowly_in_the_wind.html

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.]]> Thu, 18 Oct 1979 12:43:20 +0300 Found in the Street https://reference.library.land/patricia-highsmith/45353-found_in_the_street.html https://reference.library.land/patricia-highsmith/45353-found_in_the_street.html

When Ralph Linderman returns a stranger's wallet he found during a morning stroll through Greenwich Village, he is entirely unprepared for the complex maze of sexual obsession and disturbing psychological intrigue he is about to be drawn into. Patricia Highsmith, author of 'The Tremor of Forgery', 'Strangers on a Train', and 'The Cry of the Owl' has once again created an unsettling thriller that explores the bleakest alleyways of human desire. Highsmith 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.]]> Sat, 18 Oct 1986 12:43:21 +0300 Ripley Under Ground https://reference.library.land/patricia-highsmith/45358-ripley_under_ground.html https://reference.library.land/patricia-highsmith/45358-ripley_under_ground.html

It's been six years since Ripley murdered Dickie Greenleaf and inherited his money. Now, in Ripley Under Ground (1970), he lives in a beautiful French villa, surrounded by a world-class art collection and married to a pharmaceutical heiress. All seems serene in Ripley's world until a phone call from London shatters his peace. An art forgery scheme he set up a few years ago is threatening to unravel: a nosy American is asking questions and Ripley must go to London to put a stop to it. In this second Ripley novel, Patricia Highsmith offers a mesmerizing and disturbing tale in which Ripley will stop at nothing to preserve his tangle of lies.]]> Wed, 14 Sep 1977 21:47:48 +0300 Small G: A Summer Idyll https://reference.library.land/patricia-highsmith/45363-small_g_a_summer_idyll.html https://reference.library.land/patricia-highsmith/45363-small_g_a_summer_idyll.html

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.]]> Tue, 18 Oct 1994 12:43:23 +0200 The Glass Cell https://reference.library.land/patricia-highsmith/45364-the_glass_cell.html https://reference.library.land/patricia-highsmith/45364-the_glass_cell.html

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.]]> Wed, 14 Sep 1977 21:47:48 +0300