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Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941-1995
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68/99
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68/99
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Scholars' Citation Index
94/99
Volume of Reviews
27/99
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About This Book
Relegated during her lifetime to the pulpy genre of mystery, Patricia Highsmith has emerged since her death in 1995 as one of "our greatest modernist writers" (Gore Vidal). Presented for the first time, this one-volume assemblage of her diaries and notebooks—posthumously discovered behind Highsmith's linens and culled from more than 8,000 pages by her devoted editor, Anna von Planta—traces the mesmerizing double-life of an artist who "[worked] like mad to be something."Beginning in 1941 during her junior year at Barnard, the diaries exhibit the intoxicating "atmosphere of nameless dread" (Boston Globe) that permeates classics such as Strangers on a Train and the Ripley series. In her skewering of McCarthy-era America, her prickly disparagement of contemporary art, her fixation on love and writing, and ever-percolating prejudices, the famously secretive Highsmith reveals the roots of her psychological angst and acuity. In one of the most compulsively readable literary diaries to publish in generations, at last we see how Patricia Highsmith became Patricia Highsmith.
Reviews
"None of her books is truly a 'mystery novel' in the ordinary sense, since the reader is never in doubt as to who did, or didn't, do what to whom."
"The resurrection of...little-known, charmingly monikered queer NYC boîtes provides its own ancillary pleasures; Highsmith's detailing of her evenings out serves as a kind of stealth history of midcentury homo nightlife ..."
"An exceptional effort to make primary source material on one of America's best known mystery authors more accessible."
"An admirably edited volume for scholars and voracious fans."
"The translators have done an excellent job, matching the voice of the diaries with that of the notebooks."
"Highsmith's editor Anna von Planta, in her introduction to the published notebooks, cautions readers that the real Highsmith is only to be found in her diaries ..."
"one impressive volume ..."
"One of the delights of the early diary entries is the unlikely spectacle of Highsmith as steward of a lot of glancing—Bridget Jones-type material ..."
"It is still, at nearly 1,000 pages, a whacking book."
"opens a window onto this extraordinary writer's inner life and working methods."
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