Search results for ""Author Joan Schenkar""

Patricia Highsmith, one of the greatest writers of 20th Century American fiction, had a life as darkly compelling as that of her favourite "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.

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BY THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY, CAROL AND STRANGERS ON A TRAIN 'Highsmith writes about men like a spider writing about flies' OBSERVER 'For eliciting the menace that lurks in familiar surroundings, there's no one like Patricia Highsmith' TIME 'The Glass Cell has lost little of its disturbing power . . . Highsmith was a genuine one-off' DAILY TELEGRAPH Based on a true story, The Glass Cell is Highsmith's deeply disturbing fictionalisation of everything she learned. Falsely convicted of fraud, the easy-going but naive Philip Carter is sent to prison. Despite his devotion to Hazel, his wife, and the support of David Sullivan, a lawyer and friend who tries to avenge the injustice done to him, Carter endures six lonely and drug-ravaged years. Upon his release, Carter is a much more discerning, suspicious, and violent man. His beautiful wife is waiting for him. He has never had any reason to doubt her. For those around him, earning back his trust can mean the difference between life and death.

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BY THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY, CAROL AND STRANGERS ON A TRAIN 'Bears Highsmith's unique, unsurpassed mixture of unsettling psychological insights' THE TIMES 'The original, the best, the gloriously twisted Queen of Suspense' MARK BILLINGHAM 'Highsmith's novels are peerlessly disturbing . . . bad dreams that keep us thrashing for the rest of the night' NEW YORKER Sydney Bartleby has killed his wife. At least, he has thought about it, compulsively, repeatedly, plotting schemes, designing escapes, forging alibis. Of course he has; he's a thriller writer. He even knows how to dispose of her body. But when Alicia takes a long, unannounced holiday, Sydney descends into the treacherous world of his own fantasy.A masterpiece of noir fantasy in which Highsmith revels in eliciting the unsettling psychological forces that lurk beneath the surface of everyday life.

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BY THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY, CAROL AND STRANGERS ON A TRAIN 'Highsmith is a damn fine writer' GUARDIAN'No one has created psychological suspense more densely and deliciously satisfying' VOGUE'The setting is Venice, the characterisation brilliant, the style spare and superb' DAILY MAIL The honeymoon is over; 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, Ed Coleman, who shoots him at point-blank range and leaves him for dead. Ray survives and follows Coleman to Venice, where the two fall into an eerie game of cat-and-mouse - Coleman obsessed with vengeance and Ray determined to save his reputation, and himself. Those Who Walk Away simmers with violence and unease. As they switch between the roles of hunter and hunted, this tense psychological novel races towards a thrilling climax.

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A fictional and complex portrait of bestselling author Patricia Highsmith caught up in the longing that would inspire her queer classic, The Price of Salt Flung Out of Space is both a love letter to the essential lesbian novel, The Price of Salt, and an examination of its notorious author, Patricia Highsmith. Veteran comics creators Grace Ellis and Hannah Templer have teamed up to tell this story through Highsmith’s eyes—reimagining the events that inspired her to write the story that would become a foundational piece of queer literature. Flung Out of Space opens with Pat begrudgingly writing low-brow comics. A drinker, a smoker, and a hater of life, Pat knows she can do better. Her brain churns with images of the great novel she could and should be writing—what will eventually be Strangers on a Train— which would later be adapted into a classic film by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951. At the same time, Pat, a lesbian consumed with self-loathing, is in and out of conversion therapy, leaving a trail of sexual conquests and broken hearts in her wake. However, one of those very affairs and a chance encounter in a department store give Pat the idea for her soon-to-be beloved tale of homosexual love that was the first of its kind—it gave the lesbian protagonists a happy ending. This is not just the story behind a classic queer book, but of a queer artist who was deeply flawed. It’s a comic about what it was like to write comics in the 1950s, but also about what it means to be a writer at any time in history, struggling to find your voice. Author Grace Ellis contextualizes Patricia Highsmith as both an unintentional queer icon and a figure whose problematic views and noted anti-Semitism have cemented her controversial legacy. Highsmith’s life imitated her art with results as devastating as the plot twists that brought her fame and fortune.

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