Patricia Highsmith's Diaries and Notebooks: The New York Years, 1941-1950

Patricia Highsmith's Diaries and Notebooks: The New York Years, 1941-1950 PDF Author: Patricia Highsmith
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 1324092955
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 796

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Book Description
Essential for understanding Patricia Highsmith’s transgressive life and prophetic work, this volume is also “one of the most observant and ecstatic accounts . . . about being young and alive in New York City” (Dwight Garner,—New York Times). Before Alfred Hitchcock adapted her debut novel, Strangers on a Train, for the big screen; before her suave and sociopathic Thomas Ripley snaked his way into the canon of psychological suspense; and before The Price of Salt became a cult classic of romantic obsession, who was Patricia Highsmith? Focused on her formative years in Manhattan, this condensed edition of Highsmith’s monumental Diaries and Notebooks reveals “Pat” at her most passionate and florescent. Beginning in 1941 at Barnard College and encompassing the Texas native’s adventurous twenties,?The New York Years intertwines scenes from her dizzying social life—rife with sleepless nights barhopping in the queer underground Greenwich Village scene, always juggling too many lovers—with an intimate self-portrait of a young artist who by day dispassionately wrote comics for a paycheck. Amid all the hangovers and the breakups, she read voraciously and honed her craft with verve. Laid bare in this perennial reader’s edition are the bold, hilarious, romantic, tragic, and maddeningly contradictory observations of one of “our greatest modernist writers” (Gore Vidal).

Patricia Highsmith's Diaries and Notebooks: The New York Years, 1941-1950

Patricia Highsmith's Diaries and Notebooks: The New York Years, 1941-1950 PDF Author: Patricia Highsmith
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 1324092955
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 796

Get Book Here

Book Description
Essential for understanding Patricia Highsmith’s transgressive life and prophetic work, this volume is also “one of the most observant and ecstatic accounts . . . about being young and alive in New York City” (Dwight Garner,—New York Times). Before Alfred Hitchcock adapted her debut novel, Strangers on a Train, for the big screen; before her suave and sociopathic Thomas Ripley snaked his way into the canon of psychological suspense; and before The Price of Salt became a cult classic of romantic obsession, who was Patricia Highsmith? Focused on her formative years in Manhattan, this condensed edition of Highsmith’s monumental Diaries and Notebooks reveals “Pat” at her most passionate and florescent. Beginning in 1941 at Barnard College and encompassing the Texas native’s adventurous twenties,?The New York Years intertwines scenes from her dizzying social life—rife with sleepless nights barhopping in the queer underground Greenwich Village scene, always juggling too many lovers—with an intimate self-portrait of a young artist who by day dispassionately wrote comics for a paycheck. Amid all the hangovers and the breakups, she read voraciously and honed her craft with verve. Laid bare in this perennial reader’s edition are the bold, hilarious, romantic, tragic, and maddeningly contradictory observations of one of “our greatest modernist writers” (Gore Vidal).

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

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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.

The Talented Miss Highsmith

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

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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

Diaries and Notebooks

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

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Book Description


Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction

Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction PDF Author: Patricia Highsmith
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312286668
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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

Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes

Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes PDF Author: Patricia Highsmith
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802194974
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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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

Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires

Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires PDF Author: Richard Bradford
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1448217911
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
NOMINATED FOR THE H.R.F. KEATING AWARD, 2022. 'My New Year's Eve Toast: to all the devils, lusts, passions, greeds, envies, loves, hates, strange desires, enemies ghostly and real, the army of memories, with which I do battle – may they never give me peace' – Patricia Highsmith (New Year's Eve, 1947). Made famous by the great success of her psychological thrillers, The Talented Mr Ripley and Strangers on a Train, Patricia Highsmith is renowned as one of the most influential and celebrated modern writers. However, there has never been a clear picture of the woman behind the books. The relationship between Highsmith's lesbianism, her fraught personality – by parts self-destructive and malicious – and her fiction, has been largely ignored by biographers in the past. As an openly homosexual writer, she wrote the seminal lesbian love story Carol for which she would be venerated, in modern times, as a radical exponent of the LGBTQ+ community. Alas, her status as an LGBTQ+ icon is undermined by her excessive cruelty towards and exploitation of her friends and many lovers. In this biography, Richard Bradford brings his sharp and incisive style to one of the greatest and most controversial writers of the twentieth century. He considers Highsmith's bestsellers in the context of her troubled personal life; her alcoholism, licentious sex life, racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny and abundant self-loathing.

The Two Faces of January

The Two Faces of January PDF Author: Patricia Highsmith
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802192424
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
The award-winning “classic psychological thriller” by the author of Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley (USA Today). In a grubby Athens hotel, Rydal Keener is bored and killing time with petty scams. But when he runs into another American, Chester MacFarland, dragging a man’s body down the hotel hall, Rydal impulsively agrees to help, perhaps because Chester looks like his father. Then Rydal meets Collete, Chester’s younger wife, and captivated, becomes entangled in their sordid lives, as the drama marches to a shocking climax at the ruins of the labyrinth at Knossos. A winner of a Crime Writers of America award, The Two Faces of January was the basis of a film starring Viggo Mortensen, Kirsten Dunst, and Oscar Isaac. “An offbeat, provocative and absorbing suspense novel.” —The New York Times “Patricia Highsmith is one of the few suspense writers whose work transcends genre.” —The Austin American-Statesman

The Boy Who Followed Ripley

The Boy Who Followed Ripley PDF Author: Patricia Highsmith
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 0349004633
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
Discover the fourth novel in the iconic, propulsive RIPLEY series - now a major Netflix series starring Andrew Scott *** '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.

The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith

The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith PDF Author: Patricia Highsmith
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393020311
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 744

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Book Description
With the savage humor of Waugh and the macabre sensibility of Poe, Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995) brought a distinctly contemporary acuteness to her prolific body of noir fiction. Including over 60 short stories written throughout her career, this collection reveals the stunning versatility and terrifying power of her work.