Patricia Highsmith

Tired of an arrangement that allows his wife, Melinda, to take as many lovers as she wants in exchange for not deserting the family, Vic tries to win her back by asserting himself with a tall tale of murder, a lie that eventually comes true, in a chilling novel about the dark reality behind the idyllic facade of American suburban life. Reprint.

Deep Water

The inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock s classic 1951 film, the novel that established Patricia Highsmith as a master of noir fiction."

Strangers on a Train

Therese first glimpses Carol in the New York department store where she is working as a sales assistant. Carol is choosing a present for her daughter; she looks preoccupied, exuding an aura of elegance as perfect as a secret. Standing there at the counter, Therese suddenly feels wholly innocent - wholly unprepared for the first shock of love. Therese was nineteen, and loved by a young man she cared about, but could not desire. Carol was a sophisticated married woman. Now Therese seemed to have no other purpose to her life other than their meeting? First published under a pseudonym in 1952, Carol is a love story told with compelling wit and eroticism, and consummate tenderness.

Carol

"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).

Ripley Under Ground

Phyllis Nagy

The first stage adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's famous crime novel Tom Ripley is a criminal with an ambiguous past. He is sent to Italy by a wealthy financier to try and coax home the rich man's son. In the process Ripley becomes both attracted and seduced, finding the murder the only way to deal with the situation. From that point Ripley tries to cover up his crime. Patricia Highsmith's beguiling tale of morality and amorality is given a dramatic rendering by contemporary dramatist Phyllis Nagy, who knew Highsmith in her later years in Paris. "Each play I see by Phyllis Nagy confirms me in the belief that she is the finest playwright to have emerged in the 1990s" (Financial Times)

Play

The Talented Mr Ripley

To escape the terrible realities of an alcoholic son, a departed husband, a bedridden uncle, and a dreary parttime job, Edith records the activities of a happy family in her journal

Edith's Diary

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.

Eleven

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.

The Cry of the Owl

The Tremor of Forgery

Obsessed by his love for Annabelle Delaney, David Kelsey tries to break up her marriage and succeeds in accidentally killing her husband. Reprint. 17,000 first printing.

This Sweet Sickness

When Chester MacFarland, an American embezzler, runs into trouble with a Greek policeman in Athens, Rydal Keener, a fellow American offers to provide him with an alibi

The Two Faces of January

Sydney Bartleby, a mystery writer, pretends to murder and bury his wife while she is away on a trip, only to find himself a prime suspect in her death when she fails to return. Reprint.

A Suspension of Mercy

Graham Greene

From the late mistress of suspense and noir fiction comes a chilling anthology of short fiction, featuring works from five of her classic short story collections combined into a single anthology. By the author of The Talented Mr. Ripley. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.

The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith

"Tom Ripley is one of the most interesting characters in world literature." —Anthony Minghella, director of the 1999 film The Talented Mr. Ripley Since his debut in 1955, Tom Ripley has evolved into the ultimate bad boy sociopath. Here, in the first Ripley novel, we are introduced to suave Tom Ripley, a young striver, newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan. A product of a broken home, branded a "sissy" by his dismissive Aunt Dottie, 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. A dark reworking of Henry James's The Ambassadors, The Talented Mr. Ripley serves as an unforgettable introduction to this smooth confidence man, whose talent for murder and self-invention is chronicled in four subsequent Ripley novels.

The Talented Mr. Ripley

O Talentoso Mr. Ripley

When his assignment to write a screenplay in Tunisia falls through, Howard Ingham decides to stay on and write a novel, but becomes involved in local intrigue

Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction

Roman

Zwei Fremde im Zug

Terry Castle

"A document of persecuted love--perfect." --The Independent"Highsmith was the first writer to mix roadside Americana, transgressive sex, and the impinging threat of a morals charge--and she went about it as masterfully as anyone." --Terry Castle, The New RepublicAbout the SeriesRead by more than 12 million students over fifty-five years, Norton Critical Editions set the standard for apparatus that is right for undergraduate readers. The three-part format--annotated text, contexts, and criticism--helps students to better understand, analyze, and appreciate the literature, while opening a wide range of teaching possibilities for instructors. Whether in print or in digital format, Norton Critical Editions provide all the resources students need.

The Price of Salt - a Norton Critical Edition

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.

Patricia Highsmith

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