Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941-1995

Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941-1995 PDF Author: Patricia Highsmith
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 1324091002
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 1413

Book Description
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.

Diaries and Notebooks

Diaries and Notebooks PDF Author: Patricia Highsmith
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
ISBN: 9781474617598
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 992

Book Description

The Talented Miss Highsmith

The Talented Miss Highsmith PDF Author: Joan Schenkar
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1429961015
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 733

Book Description
A biography of the novelist who created Tom Ripley that is “both dazzling and definitive . . . as original as its contemptible, miserable, irresistible subject” (Los Angeles Times). A New York Times Notable Book * A Lambda Literary Award Winner * An Edgar Award Nominee * An Agatha Award Nominee * A Publishers Weekly Pick of the Week Patricia Highsmith, one of the great writers of twentieth-century American fiction, had a life as darkly compelling as that of her famed “hero-criminal,” the talented Tom Ripley. Joan Schenkar maps out this richly bizarre life from her birth in Texas to Hitchcock’s filming of her first novel, Strangers on a Train, to her long, strange self-exile in Europe. We see her as a secret writer for the comics, a brilliant creator of disturbing fictions, and an erotic predator with dozens of women (and a few good men) on her love list. The Talented Miss Highsmith is the first literary biography with access to Highsmith’s whole story: her closest friends, her oeuvre, her archives. It’s a compulsive page-turner unlike any other, a book worthy of Highsmith herself. “Schenkar’s writing is witty, sharp and light-handed, a considerable achievement given the immense detail.” —Jeanette Winterson, The New York Times Book Review “This is no ordinary biography . . . The Talented Miss Highsmith breaks much ground in connecting Highsmith’s diabolical tales with the real women who prompted her strongest passions.” —Janet Maslin, The New York Times “Captures the writer in all her sullen, sinister, ambivalent glory.” —Tina Jordan, Entertainment Weekly

Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires

Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires PDF Author: Richard Bradford
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1448218225
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Book Description
A vibrant portrait of the acclaimed author Patricia Highsmith, nominated for the H.R.F. Keating Award.

Beautiful Shadow

Beautiful Shadow PDF Author: Andrew Wilson
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 140881157X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 836

Book Description
WINNER OF THE EDGAR ALLAN POE AWARD WINNER OF THE LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD SHORTLISTED FOR THE WHITBREAD BIOGRAPHY AWARD 'Bring[s] us as close to understanding Highsmith as we are ever likely to get' Sunday Telegraph 'An exemplary biography of a tortured, difficult and outstandingly gifted human being' Sunday Times 'Everything Wilson has unearthed is remarkable' Mail on Sunday ____________________ Patricia Highsmith – author of Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr Ripley – had more than her fair share of secrets. During her life, she felt uncomfortable about discussing the source of her fiction and refused to answer questions about her private life. Yet after her death in February 1995, Highsmith left behind a vast archive of personal documents – diaries, notebooks and letters – which detail the links between her life and her work. Drawing on these intimate papers, together with material gleaned from her closest friends and lovers, Andrew Wilson has written the first biography of an author described by Graham Greene as the 'poet of apprehension'. Wilson illuminates the dark corners of Highsmith's life, casts light on mysteries of the creative process and reveals the secrets that the writer chose to keep hidden until after her death.

Nothing That Meets the Eye: The Uncollected Stories of Patricia Highsmith

Nothing That Meets the Eye: The Uncollected Stories of Patricia Highsmith PDF Author: Patricia Highsmith
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393345661
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 465

Book Description
"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.

Slowly, Slowly in the Wind

Slowly, Slowly in the Wind PDF Author: Patricia Highsmith
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393345637
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
"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.

Diaries and Notebooks

Diaries and Notebooks PDF Author: Patricia Highsmith
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
ISBN: 9781474617604
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 656

Book Description
'It promises to be one of the literary highlights of 2021 - publication of the diaries of Patricia Highsmith, one of the most conflicted, fascinating novelists of the 20th century' Edward Helmore, Guardian'My secrets-the secrets that everyone has-are here, in black and white.'Published for the very first time for the centenary of her birth, Patricia Highsmith's diaries and notebooks offer an unparalleled, unforgettable insight into the life and mind of one of the 20th century's most talented, complex and fascinating writers.Posthumously discovered in Highsmith's linen cupboard and edited down from 56 thick spiral notebooks by her devoted editor, Anna Von Planta, this one-volume assemblage of her diaries and notebooks traces Highsmith's mesmerising double life.The diaries show Highsmith's unwavering literary ambitions - coming often at huge personal sacrifice. We see her writing the books that would make her name, including the Ripley novels which mark the apotheosis of the psychological thriller, and The Price of Salt (later adapted into the 2015 film Carol), one of the first mainstream novels to depict two women in love.In these pages, we see Highsmith reflecting on good and evil, loneliness and intimacy, sexuality and sacrifice, love and murder. We see her tumultuous romantic relationships play out alongside her acquaintances with other writers including Jane Bowles, Aaron Copland, John Gielgud, Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, Arthur Koestler, and W. H. Auden. And in her skewering of McCarthy-era America, her prickly disparagement of contemporary art, her fixation on love and writing, and ever-percolating prejudices, we see the famously secretive Highsmith revealing the roots of her psychological angst and acuity.Written in her inimitable and dazzling prose and offering all the pleasures of Highsmith's novels, these are one of the most compulsively readable literary diaries to publish in generations - and yield, at last an unparalleled, unfiltered, unforgettable picture of this enigmatic, iconic, trailblazing author's true self.

My Autobiography of Carson McCullers: A Memoir

My Autobiography of Carson McCullers: A Memoir PDF Author: Jenn Shapland
Publisher: Tin House Books
ISBN: 1947793292
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 178

Book Description
Winner of the Publishing Triangle Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction, Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award, and a Lambda Literary Award Finalist for the National Book Award Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction How do you tell the real story of someone misremembered—an icon and idol—alongside your own? Jenn Shapland’s celebrated debut is both question and answer: an immersive, surprising exploration of one of America’s most beloved writers, alongside a genre-defying examination of identity, queerness, memory, obsession, and love. Shapland is a graduate student when she first uncovers letters written to Carson McCullers by a woman named Annemarie. Though Shapland recognizes herself in the letters, which are intimate and unabashed in their feelings, she does not see McCullers as history has portrayed her. Her curiosity gives way to fixation, not just with this newly discovered side of McCullers’s life, but with how we tell queer love stories. Why, Shapland asks, are the stories of women paved over by others’ narratives? What happens when constant revision is required of queer women trying to navigate and self-actualize in straight spaces? And what might the tracing of McCullers’s life—her history, her secrets, her legacy—reveal to Shapland about herself? In smart, illuminating prose, Shapland interweaves her own story with McCullers’s to create a vital new portrait of one of our nation’s greatest literary treasures, and shows us how the writers we love and the stories we tell about ourselves make us who we are.

Types and Shadows: Diaries 2004-2015

Types and Shadows: Diaries 2004-2015 PDF Author: Roy Strong
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
ISBN: 1474617352
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 437

Book Description
'Roy Strong's diaries are a treasure . . . magnificently readable' THE TIMES 'Essential reading' TATLER 'When it comes to viperish high-society gossip, Roy Strong is in a class of his own' DAILY MAIL In January 2004, where his third volume of Diaries begins, Roy Strong was in a state of deep grief following the death of his wife, Julia Trevelyan Oman, three months earlier. Yet the following years demonstrate his determination, energy and creativity. New ideas for books are brought to fruition, regular forays into the worlds of TV and radio are made, concluding with the Sir Portrait exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery and news of his forthcoming appointment as a Companion of Honour for services to the nation's culture. Encounters with churchmen, politicians, royalty - and friends old and new - are all described with a telling eye for detail and delicious wit. While there is frustration at the changing world around him, Types and Shadows is a hugely informative and entertaining record of a uniquely full and colourful life.
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