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Press Release THE SELECTED STORIES OF PATRICIA HIGHSMITH By Patricia Highsmith A landmark collection of noir masterpieces by the renowned author of The Talented Mr. Ripley. "In every story, Highsmith demonstrates her brilliant and inimitable talent for making even the coldest characters galvanizing. Entertaining enough for the beach, this collection should be compulsory for students of the psychological thriller." —Publishers Weekly "Patricia Highsmith's novel's are peerlessly disturbing . . . bad dreams that keep us thrashing for the rest of the night."—The New Yorker "[Highsmith is] 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 . . . Patricia Highsmith is the poet of apprehension." —from the foreword by Graham Greene "For eliciting the menace that lurks in familiar surroundings, there's no one like Patricia Highsmith."—Time More than thirty years before Blue Velvet, Patricia Highsmith's (1921-1995) stunning opus of novels and short fiction broke through the idyllic veneer of American life to expose the dark obsessions lurking behind the faces of seemingly ordinary people. Ironically, it is only after her death in 1995 that Highsmith has been recognized in her native land as a literary genius, capable of penetrating the darkest of psyches. Though she is now known primarily as a novelist, due to the revival of interest in the Ripley series, Highsmith was a prolific short story writer throughout her career. Including over 60 stories collected together for the first time, The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith (W. W. Norton & Company; August 13, 2001) represents the first of fifteen Patricia Highsmith books that W. W. Norton will publish as part of its effort to recognize her as one of the great masters of noir fiction. Selected Stories also illuminates the versatility and terrifying power of Highsmith's work. Living in self-imposed exile in Switzerland and France for most of her life, Highsmith, from this far-off vantage point, felt the freedom to express her uniquely haunting literary imagination. Already an accomplished novelist—her first novel, Strangers on a Train inspired Hithcock's classic film—Highsmith used the short story form to showcase her satiric abilities and the jolting brevity of her prose, creating characters of remarkable precision with simple turns of phrase. Whether writing about bored housewives or dangerous household pets, Highsmith continually turns our ordinary world inside out. The main characters in her first collection, The Animal-Lover's Book of Beastly Murder, are not the pets we know and love, but murderously competitive creatures with the power to wreak havoc on a happy home. In Little Tales of Misogyny, a series of sketches of female characters, Highsmith's women appear, at first glance, to resemble conventional types—as in the stories of "The Prude," "The Dancer," "The Female Novelist,"—but soon enough, she reveals the devastating power of these once-familiar characters who destroy both themselves and the men around them. In her later collections, Highsmith leaves behind these darkly comic exercises and reveals a new dimension of psychological insight to her writing. She used her studied interest in the abnormal—she had poured over psychology case histories for years—to lend an eerie, unnatural quality to the familiar surroundings of upper middle class life. In stories like "Mermaids on the Golf Course"—where a man's brush with death gives life to his most dangerous desires—she became an expert at capturing her characters just as they crossed the perilous line separating reality from fantasy. Great writers view the world askew, and in their art, they reflect our world back to us, slightly distorted. The Selected Stories is a landmark collection that will prove Highsmith to be a master of the short story form, and one of the most haunting and fiercely intelligent writers of our day. Her world is all the more frightening because we recognize it as our own.