Download or read book A Critical Study of the Fiction of Patricia Highsmith from the Psychological to the Political written by Noel Mawer and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book-length study of all of Highsmith's work, including the short fiction and her occasional writings, such as book reviews. It places the work in both cultural and personal context, and contains a comprehensive bibliography and review of the literature. Though often dismissed in the US as simply a suspense writer whose books became movies (Strangers on a Train, The Talented Mr. Ripley), in Europe Highsmith is considered a major novelist and much is written about her.
Download or read book Devils Lusts and Strange Desires written by Richard Bradford and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-01-21 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NOMINATED FOR THE H.R.F. KEATING AWARD, 2022. 'My New Year's Eve Toast: to all the devils, lusts, passions, greeds, envies, loves, hates, strange desires, enemies ghostly and real, the army of memories, with which I do battle – may they never give me peace' – Patricia Highsmith (New Year's Eve, 1947). Made famous by the great success of her psychological thrillers, The Talented Mr Ripley and Strangers on a Train, Patricia Highsmith is renowned as one of the most influential and celebrated modern writers. However, there has never been a clear picture of the woman behind the books. The relationship between Highsmith's lesbianism, her fraught personality – by parts self-destructive and malicious – and her fiction, has been largely ignored by biographers in the past. As an openly homosexual writer, she wrote the seminal lesbian love story Carol for which she would be venerated, in modern times, as a radical exponent of the LGBTQ+ community. Alas, her status as an LGBTQ+ icon is undermined by her excessive cruelty towards and exploitation of her friends and many lovers. In this biography, Richard Bradford brings his sharp and incisive style to one of the greatest and most controversial writers of the twentieth century. He considers Highsmith's bestsellers in the context of her troubled personal life; her alcoholism, licentious sex life, racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny and abundant self-loathing.
Download or read book Patricia Highsmith on Screen written by Wieland Schwanebeck and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-10-08 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first full-length study to focus on the various film adaptations of Patricia Highsmith’s novels, which have been a popular source for adaptation since Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1952). The collection of essays examines films such as The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Two Faces of January, and Carol, includes interviews with Highsmith adaptors and provides a comprehensive filmography of all existing Highsmith adaptations. Particular attention is paid to queer subtexts, mythological underpinnings, philosophical questioning, contrasting media environments and formal conventions in diverse generic contexts. Produced over the space of seventy years, these adaptations reflect broad cultural and material shifts in film production and critical approaches to film studies. The book is thus not only of interest to Highsmith admirers but to anyone interested in adaptation and transatlantic film history.
Download or read book A Study Guide for Patricia Highsmith s The Talented Mr Ripley written by Gale, Cengage Learning and published by Gale, Cengage Learning . This book was released on 2016-06-29 with total page 27 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Study Guide for Patricia Highsmith's "The Talented Mr Ripley," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
Download or read book Anxiety and Evil in the Writings of Patricia Highsmith written by Dr Fiona Peters and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-05-28 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on an impressive range of secondary material, including many elusive reviews, interviews and articles from the under-explored Highsmith Archive, Fiona Peters suggests that the usual generic distinctions -crime fiction, mystery, suspense - have been largely unhelpful in elucidating Patricia Highsmith's novels. Peters analyzes a significant selection of Highsmith's works, chosen with a view towards demonstrating the range of her oeuvre while also identifying the main themes and preoccupations running throughout her career. Adopting a psychoanalytic approach, Peters proposes a reading of Highsmith that subordinates murder as the primary focus of the novels in favor of the gaps between periods of activity represented through anxiety, waiting, lack of desire and evil. Her close readings of the Ripley series, This Sweet Sickness, Deep Water, The Tremor of Forgery, and The Cry of the Owl, among others, reveal and illuminate Highsmith's concern with minutiae and the particular. Peters makes a strong case that the specific disturbances within her texts have resulted in Highsmith's writing remaining resistant to explication and to the more sophisticated interpretative strategies that would seek to position her within a specific genre.
Download or read book Feast of Excess written by George Cotkin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1952, John Cage shocked audiences with 4'33," his composition showcasing the power of silence. From Cage's minimalism to Chris Burden's radical performance art two decades later, the post-war avant-garde sought to liberate the art world by shattering the divide between high and low art.Feast of Excess presents an engaging and accessible portrait of the cultural extremism that emerged in the United States after World War II. This "New Sensibility," as termed by Susan Sontag, was predicated upon excess, pushing and often crossing boundaries whether in the direction of minimalism ormaximalism. Through brief vignette profiles of prominent figures in literature, music, visual art, poetry, theater and journalism, George Cotkin leads readers on a focused journey through the interconnected stories of prominent figures such as Andy Warhol, Anne Sexton, John Cage, John Coltrane, BobDylan, Erica Jong, and Chris Burden, among many others, who broke barriers between artist and audience with their bold, shocking, and headline-grabbing performances.This inventive narrative captures the sentiment of liberation from high and low culture in artistic endeavors spanning from the 1950s to the 1970s and reveals the establishment of excess in American culture as the norm. A detailed emersion in the history of cultural extremism, Feast of Excess leavesreaders to consider the provocative revelation that the essence of excess remains in our culture today, for good and ill.
Download or read book 100 American Crime Writers written by S. Powell and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-08-07 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 100 American Crime Writers features discussion and analysis of the lives of crime writers and their key works, examining the developments in American crime writing from the Golden Age to hardboiled detective fiction. This study is essential to scholars and an ideal introduction to crime fiction for anyone who enjoys this fascinating genre.
Download or read book The Boy Who Followed Ripley written by Patricia Highsmith and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2008-09-17 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Ripley is an unmistakable descendant of Gatsby, that 'penniless young man without a past' who will stop at nothing." —Frank Rich The Boy Who Followed Ripley, the fourth novel in the Ripley series, is one of Patricia Highsmith's darkest and most twisted creations. Tom Ripley meets a young American runaway who has a dark secret that he is desperate to hide. Soon this unlikely pair is drawn into the seamy underworld of Berlin and a shocking kidnapping. In this masterful thriller, Highsmith shatters our perceptions of her most famous creation by letting us glimpse a more compassionate side of this amoral charmer.
Download or read book The Talented Miss Highsmith written by Joan Schenkar and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2010-01-18 with total page 733 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Patricia Highsmith's The Price of Salt is now a major motion picture (Carol) starring Cate Blanchett and Mia Wasikowska, directed by Todd Hayes A 2010 New York Times Notable Book A 2010 Lambda Literary Award Winner A 2009 Edgar Award Nominee A 2009 Agatha Award Nominee A Publishers Weekly Pick of the Week Patricia Highsmith, one of the great writers of twentieth-century American fiction, had a life as darkly compelling as that of her favorite "hero-criminal," the talented Tom Ripley. Joan Schenkar maps out this richly bizarre life from her birth in Texas to Hitchcock's filming of her first novel, Strangers on a Train, to her long, strange self-exile in Europe. We see her as a secret writer for the comics, a brilliant creator of disturbing fictions, and an erotic predator with dozens of women (and a few good men) on her love list. The Talented Miss Highsmith is the first literary biography with access to Highsmith's whole story: her closest friends, her oeuvre, her archives. It's a compulsive page-turner unlike any other, a book worthy of Highsmith herself.
Download or read book Beautiful Shadow written by Andrew Wilson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2008-12-07 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The life of Patricia Highsmith was as secretive and unusual as that of many of the best-known characters who people her "peerlessly disturbing" thrillers and short stories. Yet even as her work has found new popularity in the last few years, the life of this famously elusive writer has remained a mystery. For Beautiful Shadow, the first biography of Highsmith, British journalist Andrew Wilson mined the vast archive of diaries, notebooks, and letters she left behind, astonishing in their candor and detail. He interviewed her closest friends and colleagues as well as some of her many lovers. But Wilson also traces Highsmith's literary roots in the work of Poe, noir, and existentialism, locating the influences that helped distinguish Highsmith's writing so startlingly from more ordinary thrillers. The result is both a serious critical biography and one that reveals much about a brilliant and contradictory woman, one who despite her acclaim and affairs always maintained her solitude.
Download or read book The Cry of the Owl written by Patricia Highsmith and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2011-07-12 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
Download or read book Talented Mr Ripley written by Patricia Highsmith and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2008-05-27 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An American classic and the inspiration for the motion picture starring Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow. It’s here, in the first volume of Patricia Highsmith’s five-book Ripley series, that we are introduced to the suave Tom Ripley, a young striver seeking to leave behind his past as an orphan bullied for being a “sissy.” Newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan, Ripley meets a wealthy industrialist who hires him to bring his playboy son, Dickie Greenleaf, back from gallivanting in Italy. Soon Ripley’s fascination with Dickie’s debonair lifestyle turns obsessive as he finds himself enraged by Dickie’s ambivalent affections for Marge, a charming American dilettante, and Ripley begins a deadly game. “Sinister and strangely alluring” (Mark Harris, Entertainment Weekly) The Talented Mr. Ripley serves as an unforgettable introduction to this smooth confidence man, whose talent for self-invention is as unnerving—and unnervingly revealing of the American psyche—as ever.
Download or read book The Nineties written by Chuck Klosterman and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-02-08 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An instant New York Times bestseller! From the bestselling author of But What if We’re Wrong, a wise and funny reckoning with the decade that gave us slacker/grunge irony about the sin of trying too hard, during the greatest shift in human consciousness of any decade in American history. It was long ago, but not as long as it seems: The Berlin Wall fell and the Twin Towers collapsed. In between, one presidential election was allegedly decided by Ross Perot while another was plausibly decided by Ralph Nader. In the beginning, almost every name and address was listed in a phone book, and everyone answered their landlines because you didn’t know who it was. By the end, exposing someone’s address was an act of emotional violence, and nobody picked up their new cell phone if they didn’t know who it was. The 90s brought about a revolution in the human condition we’re still groping to understand. Happily, Chuck Klosterman is more than up to the job. Beyond epiphenomena like "Cop Killer" and Titanic and Zima, there were wholesale shifts in how society was perceived: the rise of the internet, pre-9/11 politics, and the paradoxical belief that nothing was more humiliating than trying too hard. Pop culture accelerated without the aid of a machine that remembered everything, generating an odd comfort in never being certain about anything. On a 90’s Thursday night, more people watched any random episode of Seinfeld than the finale of Game of Thrones. But nobody thought that was important; if you missed it, you simply missed it. It was the last era that held to the idea of a true, hegemonic mainstream before it all began to fracture, whether you found a home in it or defined yourself against it. In The Nineties, Chuck Klosterman makes a home in all of it: the film, the music, the sports, the TV, the politics, the changes regarding race and class and sexuality, the yin/yang of Oprah and Alan Greenspan. In perhaps no other book ever written would a sentence like, “The video for ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was not more consequential than the reunification of Germany” make complete sense. Chuck Klosterman has written a multi-dimensional masterpiece, a work of synthesis so smart and delightful that future historians might well refer to this entire period as Klostermanian.
Download or read book Patricia Highsmith Her Diaries and Notebooks 1941 1995 written by Patricia Highsmith and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2021-11-16 with total page 1413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times • Times Critics Top Books of 2021 The Times (of London) • Best Books of the Year Excerpted in The New Yorker Profiled in The Los Angeles Times Publishing for the centenary of her birth, Patricia Highsmith’s diaries “offer the most complete picture ever published” of the canonical author (New York Times). Relegated to the genre of mystery during her lifetime, Patricia Highsmith is now recognized as one of “our greatest modernist writers” (Gore Vidal). Beloved by fans who were unaware of the real psychological turmoil behind her prose, the famously secretive Highsmith refused to authorize a biography, instead sequestering herself in her Switzerland home in her final years. Posthumously, her devoted editor Anna von Planta discovered her diaries and notebooks in 1995, tucked in a closet—with tantalizing instructions to be read. For years thereafter, von Planta meticulously culled from over eight thousand pages to help reveal the inscrutable figure behind the legendary pen. Beginning with her junior year at Barnard in 1941, Highsmith ritualistically kept a diary and notebook—the former to catalog her day, the latter to brainstorm stories and hone her craft. This volume weaves diary and notebook simultaneously, exhibiting precisely how Highsmith’s personal affairs seeped into her fiction—and the sheer darkness of her own imagination. Charming yet teetering on the egotistical, young “Pat” lays bare her dizzying social life in 1940s Greenwich Village, barhopping with Judy Holliday and Jane Bowles, among others. Alongside Flannery O’Conner and Chester Himes, she attended—at the recommendation of Truman Capote—the Yaddo artist colony in 1948, where she drafted Strangers on a Train. Published in 1950 and soon adapted by Alfred Hitchcock, this debut novel brought recognition and brief financial security, but left a heartsick Highsmith agonizing: “What is the life I choose?” Providing extraordinary insights into gender and sexuality in mid-twentieth-century America, Highsmith’s diaries convey her euphoria writing The Price of Salt (1951). Yet her sophomore novel would have to be published under a pseudonym, so as not to tarnish her reputation. Indeed, no one could anticipate commercial reception for a novel depicting love between two women in the McCarthy era. Seeking relief from America, Highsmith catalogs her peripatetic years in Europe, subsisting on cigarettes and growing more bigoted and satirical with age. After a stay in Positano with a new lover, she reflects in her notebooks on being an expat, and gleefully conjures the unforgettable The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955); it would be this sociopathic antihero who would finally solidify her true fame. At once lovable, detestable, and mesmerizing, Highsmith put her turbulent life to paper for five decades, acutely aware there must be “a few usable things in literature.” A memoir as significant in our own century as Sylvia Plath’s journals and Simone de Beauvoir’s writings were to another time, Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks is an historic work that chronicles a woman’s rise against the conventional tide to unparalleled literary prominence.
Download or read book A Hobo Life in the Great Depression written by Edward C. Weideman and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Weideman's writing provides a classic expression of the American experience sometimes labeled as "modernism", which encompasses the early 20th-century search for the meaning of life in an era of social and economic breakdown characterized by a sense of loss of a stable, secure world based on a belief in and reliance on absolute truth.
Download or read book Ripley Under Ground written by Patricia Highsmith and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1970 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tom Ripley has a lovely house in the French countryside, a beautiful and very rich wife, and an art collection worthy of a connoisseur. But this gracious life has not come easily; it is based on murder, forgery, and smuggling, and could topple at any moment.
Download or read book Critical Essays on the Works of American Author Dorothy Allison written by Christine Blouch and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a collection of essays examining the works of Dorothy Allison (1950-), one of the most original and influential contemporary American women writers working today. Allison is perhaps best-known as author of the acclaimed best- selling novels Bastard Out of Carolina, a National Book Award Finalist in 1992, and Caved weller (1998). Her numerous other works have included short story and essay collections, poetry, and an autobiography. The critical essays in this collection consider Allison's short stories and essays, as well as her novels, discussing themes such as trauma and violence, the body, literary and critical connections, and class, among others. As the first major collection of essays to focus solely on Allison's works, this study provides ground-breaking work on an important and interesting contemporary writer. Allison's works attract readers from a range of academic disciplines, and they have found a broad national public readership as well. diverse, comprising readers interested in a range of gender issues, autobiographical writing, trauma narratives, Southern writing, and lesbian and gay writing and issues.
