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.

›The thing looked bluish-white, was about fifteen centimetres high, rounded at the top with what looked like a convolution or crease half way down it that disappeared in the earth. (…) Oktavian returned to the gravediggers, and realized that he had been holding his breath. He supposed, he was almost sure, that the growths out there in the darkness were highly contaminous. They would combine the carcinogens injected by the doctors as well as the original berserk cells that had caused the cancer. How large would they become? And what was nourishing them? Terrifying questions! Oktavian, like most medical students, sent chums an odd part of the human anatomy once in a while. It was almost a token of affection when a fellow received such a present in the post from a girl student, but something like this? No.‹ Grotesque ulcerations, which grow to immense sizes; huge cockroaches resistant to all forms of insecticides, which take over the control of a New York apartment building; whales, the pope, a weapon-loving US president – all provide the material of which modern (natural and unnatural) catastrophes are made.

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.

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Sixteen early stories, four of them previously unpublished in book form: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.

These texts from Patricia Highsmith's literary legacy, written between 1938 and 1949 and published here for the first time, are neither crime stories, suspense stories nor animal stories, but psychological narratives. They introduce a young unknown writer who was too shy or too inexperienced to reveal the whole scope of her talent, and who succeeded early on in putting a turbulent, hectic and often desperate life into a disciplined artistic form and simple, almost brusque language. Fourteen stories, about the homelessness of big city dwellers, about knowing little girls, about lovers bound up in their dreams, and about sad, life-battered elderly men and women. They are about norms and norm-breaking, conforming and rebellious morals.The stories follow no pattern or method, they do not even reveal the handwriting of one author. It is as if the young Highsmith invented a new mode and established a new relationship with the world with each story. And yet the monotony of the familiar, the enchantment of hoped-for congeniality of spirit and the numbed steps of a figure expelled into mourning is captured with a great deal of tact, enormous sympathy, and an amazing feeling for trenchant details.

Posthumously published stories from the 1950s, 60s and 70s, most of them psychological narratives, with a few crime and animal stories. Some of the stories are like walls made of rice paper behind which lurk the shadows of great human downfalls. In others, heroes watch their own aberrations in amazement until fate suddenly takes a turn for the better and evokes a shimmer of paradise and happiness.

It is said that, when John F. Kennedy made his famous statement on the radio »ask not, what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country!«, Patricia Highsmith got up, went into the kitchen and … fed her cats. Cats were Patricia Highsmith's faithful companions all through her life. She had up to six at the same time. They lived with her, slept on her bed and sat on her desk. And time and again they were the object of her literary and artistic work. This special compilation of stories, poems and drawings is dedicated to Patricia Highsmith's special relationship to her four-legged companions.

Carol is the only novel by Patricia Highsmith about a fulfilled love, a love perceived as happiness rather than a wicked delusion. Never again would the author, who began to work on this novel in the wake of a personal encounter, write such sensuous, poetic and erotic prose.

From a fishing trawler operating off the coast of Massachusetts, a sailor spots something white on the surface of the ocean. A seagull, a beach ball, a bathing cap? The pallid object that the crew eventually heaves on board has full breasts, a slim waist and hips like a mermaid – but this is no mermaid. Eleven stories of people whose very existence is torn apart in the flutter of an eyelid, as if the curtain had finally been raised – whoosh! – revealing a real and dangerous life that pushes them beyond their limits into the deep unknown. They are the stories of young girls, cowards, swindlers, the old and the young – all those who have fallen by the wayside in the struggle against the injustices of daily life.

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.

The novel begins with a brutal murder, but is not, in essence, a thriller. Above all, this is a love story. At the ›Small g‹, a popular, gay-friendly nightclub in Zurich, the lonely regulars who have stopped off for a beer, some attention, or for a little flirt, cross each other's paths: Ricky, a commercial artist, with his little dog Lulu; shy Luisa; Renate, a dominating costume designer, who invites Luisa to stay with her and then spies on her obsessively; Dorrie, a self-confident shop-window decorator and trainee journalist Teddy, both of whom fall in love with Luisa… In an atmosphere of suffocating heat, these intertwined and often unusual relationships are faced with challenging tests and deadly threats.

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.