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.

The Complete Ripley Novels-a first-time, boxed collection of the entire Ripley series-is a cause for critical and popular celebration. Its publication reflects the fact that Patricia Highsmith, 'no more a practitioner of the murder mystery genre ... than are Dostoevsky, Faulkner and Camus' (Joan Smith, Los Angeles Times), has finally entered the American literary canon. Marginalized throughout her career as a mere thriller writer, Highsmith has experienced a remarkable renaissance since her death in 1995. Now Highsmith fans and new readers alike can find these five novels-The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Under Ground, Ripley's Game, The Boy Who Followed Ripley, and Ripley Under Water-all housed under one roof in this brilliantly designed, highly collectible edition.

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 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. More than any other American literary character, Ripley provides 'a lens to peer into the sinister machinations of human behavior' (John Freeman, Pittsburgh Gazette).

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).

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).

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.

Since his debut in 1955, Tom Ripley has evolved into the ultimate bad boy sociopath, influencing countless novelists and filmmakers. In this first novel, we are introduced to suave, handsome Tom Ripley: a young striver, newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan in the 1950s. A product of a broken home, branded a 'sissy' by his dismissive Aunt Dottie, Ripley becomes enamored of the moneyed world of his new friend, Dickie Greenleaf. This fondness turns obsessive when Ripley is sent to Italy to bring back his libertine pal but grows enraged by Dickie's ambivalent feelings for Marge, a charming American dilettante. A dark reworking of Henry James's The Ambassadors, The Talented Mr. Ripley—immortalized in the 1998 film starring Matt Damon, Jude Law, and Gywneth Paltrow—is an unforgettable introduction to this debonair confidence man, whose talent for self-invention and calculated murder is chronicled in four subsequent novels.

Nuova edizione, arricchita da una prefazione inedita di Andrea Camilleri, per il manuale di scrittura giallistica di Patricia Highsmith: il testo è un vero e proprio vademecum del thriller, che insegna a tessere la trama di una storia da brivido, ma è anche un manuale di scrittura di più ampia portata. La giallista americana svela come è strutturato un thriller, anche attraverso l'analisi di uno dei suoi stessi romanzi, 'L'alibi di cristallo'.

A volume of stories, many of them published here for the first time, from the creator of Ripley and }Strangers On A Train{. They span almost fifty years of her career, showing the evolution of her writing and her trademark dark themes.

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.

With Norton's publication of Slowly, Slowly in the Wind, Patricia Highsmith's entire body of work is now back in print. First published in 1979, this volume is one of Highsmith's most nuanced and psychologically suspenseful works. Slowly, Slowly in the Wind gathers stories that explore the hypocrisies of the Catholic Church, the writing life, Poe-like horror fantasies, and more. This collection is a perfect example of Highsmith's view of human nature and a fitting capstone to the reintroduction of one of the twentieth century's greatest writers.

A collection of dark tales, originally published in 1981, sketches the lives of suburban residents who appear normal at first but who are later revealed to have macabre realities. By the late author of The Talented Mr. Ripley. Reprint. 13,000 first printing.

€ 15,20

In 1961, Patricia Highsmith received a fan letter from a prison inmate. A correspondence ensued between author and inmate, and Highsmith became fascinated with the psychological traumas that incarceration can inflict. Based on a true story, The Glass Cell is Highsmith's fictionalization of everything she learned. Falsely convicted of fraud, the easy-going but naive Philip Carter is sent to prison. Despite his devotion to Hazel, his wife, and the support of David Sullivan, a lawyer and friend who tries to avenge the injustice done to him, Carter endures six lonely and drug-ravaged years. Upon his release, Carter is a much more discerning, suspicious, and violent man. For those around him, earning back his trust can mean the difference between life and death.

'I have long had a theory that Nabokov knew The Price of Salt and modeled the climactic cross-country car chase in Lolita on Therese and Carol's frenzied bid for freedom,' writes Terry Castle in The New Republic about this novel, arguably Patricia Highsmith's finest, first published in 1952 under the pseudonym Clare Morgan. Soon to be a new film, The Price of Salt tells the riveting story of Therese Belivet, a stage designer trapped in a department-store day job, whose salvation arrives one day in the form of Carol Aird, an alluring suburban housewife in the throes of a divorce. They fall in love and set out across the United States, pursued by a private investigator who eventually blackmails Carol into a choice between her daughter and her lover. With this reissue, The Price of Salt may finally be recognized as a major twentieth-century American novel.

In Deep Water, set in the small town of Little Wesley, Vic and Melinda Meller'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 tries to win her back by asserting himself through a tall tale of murder-one that soon comes true.

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.

Stories from The Animal-Lover's Book of Beastly Murder portray, with incisive humor, the murderously competitive desires of our most trusted companions. In this satirical reprise of Kafka, cats, dogs, and the occasional cockroach are no longer benign elements of a happy home but actually have the power to destroy it.

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

In This Sweet Sickness, David Kelsey has an unyielding conviction that life will turn out all right for him; he just has to fix The Situation: he is in love with a married woman. Obsessed with Annabelle and the life he has imagined for them, David prepares to win her over, whatever it takes.

The great revival of interest in Patricia Highsmith continues with the publication of this legendary, cultish short story collection. 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 attesets to Highsmith's reputation as 'the poet of apprehension' (Graham Greene).

The great revival of interest in Patricia Highsmith continues with the publication of this novel that will give dog owners nightmares for years to come. 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 A Dog's Ransom, Highsmith blends a savage humor with brilliant social satire in this dark tale of a highminded criminal who hits a wealthy Manhattan couple where it hurts the most when he kidnaps their beloved poodle. This work attesets to Highsmith's reputation as 'the poet of apprehension' (Graham Greene).