Ripley Under Ground

Author: Patricia Highsmith
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393344746
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 287

Book Description
"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).

The Boy Who Followed Ripley

Author: Patricia Highsmith
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 0349004633
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Book Description
BY THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY, CAROL AND STRANGERS ON A TRAIN The continuing adventures of Ripley starring Matt Damon in The Talented Mr Ripley. 'The Ripley books are marvellously, insanely readable' THE TIMES 'It's hard to imagine anyone interested in modern fiction who has not read the Ripley novels' DAILY TELEGRAPH 'Peerlessly Disturbing' NEW YORKER When a troubled young runaway arrives on Tom Ripley's French estate, he is drawn into a world he thought he'd left behind: the seedy underworld of Berlin, involving kidnapping plots, lies and deception. Ripley becomes the boy's protector as friendship develops between the young man with a guilty conscience and the older one with no conscience at all. Highsmith shatters our perceptions of her most famous creation by letting us glimpse a more compassionate side of this amoral charmer. The Boy Who Followed Ripley is followed by Ripley Under Water.

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

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.

Ripley's Game

Author: Patricia Highsmith
Publisher: Penguin Longman
ISBN: 9781405850025
Category : Detective and mystery stories
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
One night Tom Ripley is insulted by a man at a party. An ordinary person would just be upset by this, but Tom Ripley is not an ordinary person. Months later, when a friend asks him for help with two simple murders, he remembers this night and plans revenge. He starts a game - a very nasty game, in which he plays with the life of a sick and innocent man. But how far will he go?

Deep Water

Author: Patricia Highsmith
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393324559
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Book Description
The great revival of interest in Highsmith continues with "Deep Water, " set in the small town of Little Wesley. Vic and Melinda's loveless marriage is held together only by Melinda's extramarital affairs. Eventually, Vic tries to win her back by asserting himself through a tall tale of murder--one that soon comes true.

Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction

Author: Patricia Highsmith
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312286668
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 164

Book Description
Originally published in Great Britain by Polar Press Limited.

Slowly, Slowly in the Wind

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.

The Talented Miss Highsmith

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

The Blunderer

Author: Patricia Highsmith
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393345041
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Book Description
"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.

Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes

Author: Patricia Highsmith
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802194974
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 192

Book Description
Short stories filled with “satire, mischief, and menace” by the author of The Talented Mr. Ripley (Harper’s Bazaar). These ten stories chronicle a world gone slightly mad, with dark, inventive takes on environmental degradation, apocalyptic disaster, political chaos, religious conservatism, and more. From a winner of both an O. Henry Award and a Silver Dagger Award, among other honors, and the author of Strangers on a Train, the basis for the classic Hitchcock film, this collection of short fiction is filled with “afterimages that will tremble—but stay—in our minds” (The New Yorker). “Whereas we read Stephen King or Ruth Rendell to relish the thrills that come from carefully controlled verbal terror, Highsmith is not to be taken so lightly. She conveys a firm, unshakable belief in the existence of evil—personal, psychological, and political. . . . The genius of Tales—and all of Highsmith’s writing—is that it is at once deeply disturbing and exhilarating.” —The Boston Phoenix “Combining the best features of the suspense genre with the best of existential fiction . . . The stories are fabulous, in all senses of that word.” —Paul Theroux