As much as Patricia Highsmith wrote, there is one thing she always left out: herself. So it was a sensation when, after her death in 1995, 18 journals and 38 notebooks were found in her linen cupboard, written in without interruption since her college days.
A woman who travelled around half the world, lived at least two lives simultaneously and, from a cool half-distance, penned psychological novels about fundamental themes like love, alienation and murder.

»Every artist is in the business for his health«
Notebook, August 31st, 1966

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.

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.

When Richard Alderman becomes a born-again Christian, his conversion rips his once close-knit family apart. He and his youngest son, Robbie, embrace their newfound faith, while his eldest son, Arthur, rejects it. Caught in the middle of the ensuing web of lies is his wife, Lois, as she struggles to keep the peace. But when the church elders start to interfere in Arthur's love life, events spiral toward violence.

In this masterful novel, Patricia Highsmith weaves a powerful tale about blind faith and the slippery notion of justice.

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.

Carefree dolce vita is the life Tom Ripley dreams of in his dingy New York basement – and the one his school friend Dickie Greenleaf leads. When Dickie's father, a wealthy industrialist, asks Tom to travel to Italy to bring back his lost son, it is a dream come true for a down-and-out like Tom. But nobody knows how far Ripley will go to become part of Dickie's world, forever. 
 
More than twenty years after Anthony Minghella's successful remake, we can finally reunite with Patricia Highsmith's most compelling character in the gripping Netflix series starring Andrew Scott as Tom Ripley, costarring Dakota Fanning and Johnny Flynn. 
Written and directed by Hollywood legend Steven Zaillian (Hannibal, Schindler's List, The Night Of).

Howard Ingham, an American writer, is sent to Tunisia to gather material for a movie. As his director fails to arrive as scheduled, Ingham decides to stay on and work instead on a novel. Gradually, however, a series of peculiar events lures him inexorably into the deep, ambivalent shadows of this town, into deceit and away from conventional morality.

Collected here in this stunning box set edition, The Complete Ripley Novels celebrates one of fiction’s most iconic literary characters. This collector’s item, featuring all five classic Ripley novels – The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Under Ground, Ripley’s Game, The Boy Who Followed Ripley and Ripley Under Water – is published to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of Patricia Highsmith’s death in 1995. The Highsmith literary renaissance, initially sparked by a 1999 film adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley – which re-introduced fans and new readers alike to the unforgettable Tom Ripley, the debonair confidence man with a talent for self-invention and murder – continues in full force with three major Highsmith movies in the offing as well as the publication of this volume, »the most sinister and strangely alluring quintet the crime fiction genre has ever produced« (Entertainment Weekly).

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.

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.

›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 honeymoon is over, as they say, the bride dead by her own hand. Ray Garrett, the grieving husband, convinces the police in Rome of his innocence, but not his father-in-law, the American painter Ed Coleman, who shoots him at point-blank range and leaves him for dead. Ray survives, however, and follows Coleman to Venice, where the two fall into an eerie game of cat-and-mouse: Coleman obsessed with vengeance and Ray equally insistent on clearing his conscience.

The diary of a mother who writes about the things that move her: her husband who adores her, and her son Cliffie who is doing brilliantly at the elite Princeton University where the girls and the companies all want him. And Edith herself who is a successful journalist. In fact, however, none of it is true! What Edith Howland writes about in her diary are daydreams, fantasies about an ideal world where there is no war, illness, separation, young drug dealers or loneliness.

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.

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.