<div>Short stories filled with &ldquo;satire, mischief, and menace&rdquo; by the author of The Talented Mr. Ripley (Harper&rsquo;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 &ldquo;afterimages that will tremble&mdash;but stay&mdash;in our minds&rdquo; (The New Yorker). &ldquo;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&mdash;personal, psychological, and political. . . . The genius of Tales&mdash;and all of Highsmith&rsquo;s writing&mdash;is that it is at once deeply disturbing and exhilarating.&rdquo; &mdash;The Boston Phoenix &ldquo;Combining the best features of the suspense genre with the best of existential fiction . . . The stories are fabulous, in all senses of that word.&rdquo; &mdash;Paul Theroux</div>

Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes

<div>An expatriate is beset by dark temptations in this tale by the author of The Talented Mr. Ripley: &ldquo;Her best novel&rdquo; (The New Yorker). Set in Tunisia in the mid-1960s, this is the story of Howard Ingham, an American writer who has gone abroad to gather material for a movie too sordid to be set in America. Ingham is cool toward the girlfriend he left behind in New York&mdash;but his feelings start to change when she doesn&rsquo;t answer his increasingly aggravated letters, and the filmmaker who hired Ingham fails to show in Tunisia. Amid the tea shops and alleys of the souk, the sun-blasted architecture, and the beaches and hotels frequented by international tourists, Ingham tries to pass the time by working on a writing project. But a series of peculiar events&mdash;a hushed-up murder, a vanished corpse, secret broadcasts to the Soviet Union&mdash;will pull him in, and may finally put his increasingly fragile sense of morality to the test. &ldquo;Highsmith&rsquo;s finest novel.&rdquo; &mdash;Graham Greene, author of The Quiet American &ldquo;Her books have stylistic texture, psychological depth, mesmeric readability.&rdquo; &mdash;The Sunday Times</div>

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The Tremor of Forgery

<div>&ldquo;Patricia Highsmith&rsquo;s novels are peerlessly disturbing . . . bad dreams that keep us thrashing for the rest of the night.&rdquo; &mdash;The New Yorker Ray Garrett, a wealthy young American living in Europe, is grieving over the death of his wife. Ray is at a loss for why she would take her own life, but Peggy&rsquo;s father Ed Coleman, has no such uncertainty&mdash;he blames Ray completely. Late one night in Rome, Coleman shoots Ray at point-blank range. He thinks he&rsquo;s had his revenge, but Ray survives, and follows Coleman and his wealthy girlfriend to Venice. In Venice, it happens again: Coleman attacks his loathed son-in-law, dumping him into the cold waters of the laguna. Ray survives with the help of a boatman&mdash;and this time he goes into hiding, living in a privately rented room under a fake name. So begins an eerie game of cat and mouse. Coleman wants vengeance, Ray wants a clear conscience, and the police want to solve the mystery of what happened to the missing American. As Ray and Coleman stalk each other through the narrow streets and canals, the hotels and bars of the beguiling city, Those Who Walk Away becomes a literary thriller that simmers with violence and unease from the acclaimed author of such classics as Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley. &ldquo;An atmosphere of nameless dread, of unspeakable foreboding, permeates every page of Patricia Highsmith.&rdquo; &mdash;The Boston Globe &ldquo;For eliciting the menace that lurks in familiar surroundings, there&rsquo;s no one like Patricia Highsmith.&rdquo; &mdash;Time</div>

Those Who Walk Away

<div>The award-winning &ldquo;classic psychological thriller&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s body down the hotel hall, Rydal impulsively agrees to help, perhaps because Chester looks like his father. Then Rydal meets Collete, Chester&rsquo;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. &ldquo;An offbeat, provocative and absorbing suspense novel.&rdquo; &mdash;The New York Times &ldquo;Patricia Highsmith is one of the few suspense writers whose work transcends genre.&rdquo; &mdash;The Austin American-Statesman</div>

The Two Faces of January

<div>Short stories of suspense by the author of Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley&mdash;&ldquo;a brilliant collection&rdquo; with a foreword by Graham Greene (The Sunday Times). Master of tension Patricia Highsmith is best known for her novels of ever-increasing suspense, but she is equally adept at the short story, where &ldquo;she is after the quick kill rather than the slow encirclement of the reader.&rdquo; Eleven is Highsmith&rsquo;s first collection of short stories&mdash;dark masterpieces of obsession and foreboding, violence and instability (Graham Greene, from the foreword). In these pages, naturalists meet gruesome ends and unhinged heroes disturb our sympathies; simple cases of murder turn out to be something even more sinister, and the cruelties of childhood come to unsettling life. This is a captivating, important collection from &ldquo;one of the truly brilliant short-story writers of the twentieth century&rdquo; (Otto Penzler).</div>

Eleven

<div>A chilling novel of desire and obsession in 1980s New York from the author “who can change reality to nightmare with one well-turned phrase” (Cleveland Plain Dealer). Elsie Tyler turns heads wherever she goes. After leaving her upstate hometown for Greenwich Village, the charming young waitress soon finds herself surrounded by admirers, including Jack and Natalia Sutherland, a married couple who invite Elsie into their bohemian inner circle and help her launch a career as a model. Meanwhile, Ralph Linderman, a middle-aged security guard with a dog named God, is nursing his own obsession with Elsie. He sets out to protect her from the “bad company” she attracts, but his uninvited affections are overbearing, possibly even pathological. When Ralph finds Jack’s wallet on a morning stroll through the Village, and returns it, he is entirely unprepared for the complex maze of sexual obsession and disturbing psychological intrigue he is about to be drawn into. Found in the Street is classic Highsmith—an engrossing, unsettling thriller that explores the bleakest alleyways of human desire, and a kaleidoscopic portrait of 1980s New York City. Patricia Highsmith, author of Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley, has been called “one of the finest crime novelists” by the New York Times—and is now considered one of the most original voices in twentieth-century American fiction.</div>

Found in the Street

<div>An “elegant and psychologically sophisticated” novel about two men with a murdered women between them (Cleveland Plain Dealer). Ramón, a devout Catholic, fixes furniture in Mexico City, not far from where he was born into poverty. Theodore, a rich German expatriate and painter, believes in nothing at all. You’d think the two had nothing in common. Except, of course, that both had slept with Lelia. The two form an unlikely friendship, until Lelia is found brutally murdered. Both are suspects—and each suspects the other. Twisting in a limbo of tension and doubt, Ramón and Theodore seize on a third man, a thief seen at Lelia’s apartment, and their hunt takes them from Mexico City to sun-drenched Acapulco, and to a small colonial mountain town. An atmospheric, psychologically complex novel, A Game for the Living is Highsmith at her best.</div>

A Game for the Living

<div>A man’s obsession with a beautiful woman leads to danger in this psychological thriller by the author of The Talented Mr. Ripley and The Price of Salt. 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. From Patricia Highsmith, once called “the balladeer of stalking” by The New Yorker, The Cry of the Owl is a modern classic ready to be reborn. Praise for The Cry of the Owl “Kafka with a vengeance.” —The Spectator (London) “Highsmith generates suspense out of a different sort of fear: not the fear of death, which drives most crime-centered entertainment, but the pettier, more intimate dread of humiliation, of being caught on the street with nothing on. . . . There’s something else here, hard to identify, pulling us along relentlessly, as thrillers do—an undertow, a surge of third-rail current.” —The New Yorker “The Cry of the Owl is a deceptively easy stroll toward personal chaos and destruction. It is thoroughly chilling because nothing seems farfetched. Odd, yes, but believable. . . . The Cry of the Owl is creepy and unsettling, a taut psychological thriller.” —Linnea Lannon, Detroit Free Press “One of her lesser-known works . . . and one of her most unsettling. Which is saying plenty. . . . The crime writer Elmore Leonard has written a host of novels with the same basic plot: Plans go wrong. The story message driving all of Highsmith’s work is similarly simple and clear: We live on thin ice. Highsmith revolts some readers, yet hypnotizes many others. She’s sui generis, a writer of almost occult power.” —Richard Rayner, Los Angeles Times</div>

Patricia Highsmith
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Books By Patricia Highsmith (8 Books)

Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes

The Tremor of Forgery

Those Who Walk Away

The Two Faces of January

Eleven

Found in the Street

A Game for the Living

The Cry of the Owl

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Patricia HighsmithFollow this author