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Before Patricia Highsmith shot to fame with her debut novel Strangers on a Train, she wrote psychological stories. About uprooted immigrants, courageous lovers, intuitive girls and boys, sensitive spiders, and women and men buffeted around by the storms of life. Back then, her stories were published in school journals and women’s magazines.
All the more wonderful for us, as we can now discover these raw diamonds.
Sixteen early stories, four of them previously unpublished in book form:
The World’s Champion Ball-Bouncer
Primroses Are Pink
The Story of Sydney
The Legend of the Convent of Saint Fotheringay
Further included are the following stories:
Miss Juste and the Green Rompers, Doorbell for Louisa, When the Fleet Was in at Mobile,
The Mightiest Mornings, The Still Point of the Turning World, A Mighty Nice Man, Uncertain Treasure, Birds Poised to Fly, Magic Casements, The Heroine, The Snail-Watcher, and Mrs. Afton, among thy Green Braes.
320 pages
2020
978-3-257-07152-8
»Patricia Highsmith is one of the greatest American writers of the last century.«
»Theft, adultery, murder plots, complicity, betrayal – in her excellent crime novellas, the author shines a light on her characters’ inner worlds. Their motives are what fascinate her most.«
»Patricia Highsmith doesn't get swept away with her characters, she examines them meticulously, as though under a microscope.«
»They [the stories] tell of women who are pyromaniacs, nuns, fanatical gym teachers – they are entertaining, sharp-witted and sometimes even eerie.«
»One can see a gifted perfectionist at work in these early stories. They are studies for the specific type of detective novel that won Patricia Highsmith international fame from the 1950s onwards.«
»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.«