Under a Dark Angel's Eye: The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith

Description

Disturbing, exhilarating, potent, savagely funny.

Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995) was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and moved to New York when she was six. In her senior year, she edited the college magazine, having decided at the age of sixteen to become a writer. Her first novel, Strangers on a Train (1950), was made into a classic film by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951. The Talented Mr Ripley (1955), introduced the fascinating anti-hero Tom Ripley, and was made into an Oscar-winning film in 1999 by Anthony Minghella. Highsmith died in Locarno, Switzerland, in February 1995. Her last novel, Small g: A Summer Idyll, was published posthumously, the same year.

By opening this book, you've given Patricia Highsmith permission to follow you, catch you, take you apart. Get ready to run. -- Carmen Maria Machado Every story shimmers like a dark gem as Patricia Highsmith turns her gimlet eye on domesticity, suburban madness, toxic families and the loneliness of childhood. Often mordantly funny and always psychologically acute, this collection is not to be missed -- Megan Abbott For eliciting the menace that lurks in familiar surroundings, there's no one like Patricia Highsmith * Time * A writer who has created a world of her own - a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger . . . Highsmith is the poet of apprehension -- Graham Greene If Patricia Highsmith, in her novels, holds us hostages in a maze of dark dreams, inexplicable desires, and irrational urges, in her short stories she breaks down the maze, wedges its fragments in our minds, and leaves it to us to rebuild the phantom maze and submit ourselves again to her grip -- Yiyun Li The sheer macabre, amoral brilliance of Patricia Highsmith surely makes her one of the finest writers in the English language -- Richard Osman I love Patricia Highsmith . . . What a revelation her writing was -- Gillian Flynn To call Patricia Highsmith a thriller writer is true but not the whole truth: her books have stylistic texture, psychological depth, mesmeric readability * Sunday Times * The genius of Highsmith lies not just in her rare ability to evoke evil and misery, but in her capacity for making it moreish, so that one never tires of her cynicism and bleakness, even over 600 pages. Reading her is like having a devil on your shoulder arguing that decency and good citizenship are boring and cowardly, and so compellingly that you've acquiesced before you know it * Telegraph * One of the greatest crime writers of the last century. Nobody in a Highsmith story can be taken for granted. Common decency is a thin veneer easily cracked to release an undercurrent of depravity. While this collection of her short pieces, published to mark her centenary, starts gently with a marital dispute, we are soon on a voyage into the darker recesses of the imagination * Daily Mail * It is her rare capacity to make the reader question the moral universe in which we all hoped we lived. To that extent, she is not just a good writer, she is a great one -- A. N. Wilson * The Tablet *