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Home Page About Patricia Highsmith The Books Read the story "The Mobile Bed-Object" Read the Reviews Reading Group Guide Press Release Buy the Books W.W. Norton Home |
Reviews and Praise"[Highsmith] has an uncanny feeling for the rhythms of terror."—Times Literary Supplement [London] "An atmosphere of nameless dread, of unspeakable foreboding, permeates every page of Patricia Highsmith, and there's nothing quite like it."—Boston Globe "Patricia Highsmith's novels are peerlessly disturbing...bad dreams that keep us thrashing for the rest of the night."—The New Yorker "Patricia Highsmith is often called a mystery or crime writer, which is a bit like calling Picasso a draftsman." —Cleveland Plain Dealer "One of our greatest modernist writers."—Gore Vidal "[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."—Graham Greene, from his foreword to The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith "This is Highsmith at her best, building step by step a set of obsessions or feelings that must somehow be released, until violence seems inevitable, almost easy to understand. She has a genius for describing the impulse to kill without justifying or even pretending to fully comprehend it. Which is why she is no more a practitioner of the murder mystery genre (under which she is all too frequently misclassified) than are Dostoevsky, Faulkner and Camus. W.W. Norton is to be commended for making her available to us again, for giving us another chance to experience her strange, wise and deliciously disturbing cosmology."—Joan Smith, Los Angeles Times, on The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith, June 8, 2001. "In stories such as these, Highsmith, rather than mocking her characters' insufficiencies, acknowledges that the world is indeed so hard that we must all be a little odd to get through it. In the end, the oddity we shivered at is no longer alien—not purely strange, but strangely familiar."—Penelope Mesic, Book magazine, on The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith, July/August 2001. Read the entire review "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, on The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith |