From the eerily outlandish (a man suffocated by countless snails) to the irrational and brutal (a child's revenge on his mother for cooking his pet turtle), ›The Snail Watcher‹ presents a gallery of bizarre characters, each driven by strange, unspoken urges.

Stories from The Animal-Lover's Book of Beastly Murder portray the murderously competitive desires of our most trusted companions. In this satirical reprise of Kafka, cats and dogs are no longer benign elements of a happy home but actually have the power to destroy it. 

In the darkly satiric, often mordantly hilarious sketches that make up Little Tales of Misogyny, Patricia Highsmith upsets our conventional notions of female character, revealing the devastating power of these once familiar creatures – The Dancer, The Female Novelist, The Prude – who destroy both themselves and the men around them.

Again and again the President's advisor has to recount the assassination attempt, how he saved the President's life by using his own body as a human shield. Today he finally feels well enough to »chase after mermaids on the golf course.« But the metaphor does not work, and because it does not work, it proves to be fatal. Andrew Spatz saw the young boy just a moment ago. Then the shimmering heat of midday and Andrew's feverish dreams are interrupted by a shot… from nowhere? The police say it came from Andrew's room. Ten stories from the years 1982 to 1985, about modern people in danger, about lost youths, unrequited lovers and middle-aged women and men making one last effort at happiness... Close-ups of souls that have lost their balance and who, in the midst of the crisis, acquire undreamed of (and often fatal) powers or, very seldom, sprout saviour's wings.

›Slowly, slowly in the wind‹: Patricia Highsmith begins her modern-day tale of Romeo and Juliet in poetically suggestive fashion. Peter loves Maggie, and Maggie loves Peter. But their fathers, big landowners in Coldstream Heights, Maine, are as implacable enemies as Shakespeares Montagues and Capulets, intent on driving out all trace of poetry from their children. At any cost. Who would be surprised, therefore, to learn that the poetic opening is a quotation from the Watergate scandal, and that the object dangling in the wind is a hanged man! Twelve psychological stories from the Seventies about the dream of love and happiness and just how far modern people - young parents, lovers, lonely big-city inhabitants - are prepared to go in order to realise it.

Being a writer – a harmless profession? After this book, everyone will agree: reading is safer! Sydney Bartleby has murdered his wife Alicia a dozen times over. Of course he has – after all, he is a scriptwriter and author of crime thrillers, a profession in which he has achieved as little success as he has in his marriage. When Alicia unexpectedly goes on a journey, her husband exploits her absence to perfect his artistic methods. But when Alicia fails to return, Sydney's behaviour – in strict accordance with the script – becomes highly suspicious. Patricia Highsmith recounts Sydney's (un)-stoppable descent into the deceitful world of his dreams and fantasies. Initially, he believes that he can simply go on dreaming and inventing, but soon he finds himself writing not for his novel, but for his life.

When Ralph Linderman returns a stranger's wallet that he found during a morning stroll through Greenwich Village, he is entirely unprepared for the complex maze of sexual obsession and disturbing psychological intrigue he is about to be drawn into.

Rydal Keener is waiting for something exciting to happen in the grubby Athens hotel. At forty-odd, Chester MacFarland has been waiting much longer, expecting his life of stock manipulation and fraud to catch up with him. And Colette, Chester's wife, is waiting for something altogether different. After a nasty little incident in the hotel, they all wait together. As the tension in their three-cornered waiting game mount, they learn that while passports and silence can be bought, other things can cost as much as your life.