The great revival of interest in Patricia Highsmith continues with this work that reveals the chilling reality behind the idyllic facade of American suburban life. The stories collected in Mermaids on the Golf Course are among Highsmith's most mature, psychologically penetrating works. As in the title story, in which a man's brush with death endows his everyday desires with tragic consequences, the warm familiarities of middle-class life become the eerie setting for Highsmith's chilling portrayals of violence, secrecy, and madness.
The great revival of interest in Patricia Highsmith continues with this work that reveals the chilling reality behind the idyllic facade of American suburban life.
'Brilliant' Paula Hawkins In 1964, the eccentric American novelist Patricia Highsmith is hiding out in a cottage in Suffolk, to concentrate on her writing and escape her fans. She has another motive too - a secret romance with a married lover based in London. Unfortunately it soon becomes clear that all her demons have come with her. Prowlers, sexual obsessives, frauds, imposters, suicides and murderers: the tropes of her fictions clamour for her attention, rudely intruding on her peaceful Suffolk retreat. After the arrival of Ginny, an enigmatic young journalist bent on interviewing her, events take a catastrophic turn. Except, as always in Highsmith's troubled life, matters are not quite as they first appear . . . Masterfully recreating Highsmith's much exercised fantasies of murder and madness, Jill Dawson probes the darkest reaches of the imagination in this novel - at once a brilliant portrait of a writer and an atmospheric, emotionally charged, riveting tale.
NOMINATED FOR THE H.R.F. KEATING AWARD, 2022. 'My New Year's Eve Toast: to all the devils, lusts, passions, greeds, envies, loves, hates, strange desires, enemies ghostly and real, the army of memories, with which I do battle – may they never give me peace' – Patricia Highsmith (New Year's Eve, 1947). Made famous by the great success of her psychological thrillers, The Talented Mr Ripley and Strangers on a Train, Patricia Highsmith is renowned as one of the most influential and celebrated modern writers. However, there has never been a clear picture of the woman behind the books. The relationship between Highsmith's lesbianism, her fraught personality – by parts self-destructive and malicious – and her fiction, has been largely ignored by biographers in the past. As an openly homosexual writer, she wrote the seminal lesbian love story Carol for which she would be venerated, in modern times, as a radical exponent of the LGBTQ+ community. Alas, her status as an LGBTQ+ icon is undermined by her excessive cruelty towards and exploitation of her friends and many lovers. In this biography, Richard Bradford brings his sharp and incisive style to one of the greatest and most controversial writers of the twentieth century. He considers Highsmith's bestsellers in the context of her troubled personal life; her alcoholism, licentious sex life, racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny and abundant self-loathing.
With the savage humor of Waugh and the macabre sensibility of Poe, Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995) brought a distinctly contemporary acuteness to her prolific body of noir fiction. Including over 60 short stories written throughout her career, this collection reveals the stunning versatility and terrifying power of her work.
Winner of the 2019 H.R.F. Keating Award for the best biographical or critical book related to crime fiction Originally published by Gryphon Books in 1993, Difficult Lives was one of the earliest attempts to track the legacy of original paperback writers such as Jim Thompson, David Goodis and Chester Himes. The individual essays on these three first appeared in literary magazines. Difficult Lives visits a rare moment when daylight was showing around the seams of American society and visions quite in contrast to the sanctioned version drifted to the surface in books one bought off racks in drugstores and bus stations -- stark, bonelike, disturbing books. We're pleased to make Difficult Lives available again, doubling your pleasure by pairing it with Hitching Rides, an equal volume of new essays on other crime writers including Derek Raymond, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Patricia Highsmith and Shirley Jackson.
Come along for 25 Mermaid’s adventures, collected together in one ebook - easy-to-read and easy-to-navigate! In folklore, a mermaid is an aquatic creature with the head and upper body of a female human and the tail of a fish. Mermaids appear in the folklore of many cultures worldwide, including the Near East, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Mermaids have been a popular subject of art and literature in recent centuries, such as in Hans Christian Andersen's literary fairy tale "The Little Mermaid". In this great book collected works of Hans Christian Andersen, James Barrie, Andrew Lang, L. Frank Baum, H. G. Wells, Bret Harte, Louise M. Alcott et al. Hans Christian Andersen. The Little Mermaid Jonathan Ceredig Davies. Fairies and Mermaids Andrew Lang. The Golden Mermaid. Andrew Lang. Hans, the Mermaid’s Son Mabel Quiller-Couch. Lutey and the Mermaid Mrs. Molesworth. The Unselfish Mermaid Anonymous. The Fisherman and The Merman Abbie Phillips Walker. Hilda's Mermaid Charles Weathers Bump. The Mermaid of Druid Lake Louisa M. Alcott. Mermaids Louise Imogen Guiney. Water-Folk Abbie Farwell Brown. The Mermaid L. Frank Baum. The Sea Fairies Clara F. Guernsey. The Merman and The Figure-Head William Elliot Griffis. The Entangled Mermaid H. G. Wells. The Sea Lady Daniel O'Сonnor. The Story of Peter Pan Retold from the fairy play by Sir James Barrie E. Nesbit. Wet Magic Kirk Munroe. A Fighting Mermaid Lily Dougal. The Mermaid Bret Harte. The Mermaid Of Lighthouse Point Grant M. Overton. Mermaid G. Basil Barham. The Mermaid of Zennor John Timbs. Stories of Mermaids Philip Henry Gosse. Mermaids
The life of Patricia Highsmith was as secretive and unusual as that of many of the best-known characters who people her "peerlessly disturbing" thrillers and short stories. Yet even as her work has found new popularity in the last few years, the life of this famously elusive writer has remained a mystery. For Beautiful Shadow, the first biography of Highsmith, British journalist Andrew Wilson mined the vast archive of diaries, notebooks, and letters she left behind, astonishing in their candor and detail. He interviewed her closest friends and colleagues as well as some of her many lovers. But Wilson also traces Highsmith's literary roots in the work of Poe, noir, and existentialism, locating the influences that helped distinguish Highsmith's writing so startlingly from more ordinary thrillers. The result is both a serious critical biography and one that reveals much about a brilliant and contradictory woman, one who despite her acclaim and affairs always maintained her solitude.
Deciding what to read next when you've just finished an unputdownable novel can be a daunting task. The Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide features hundreds of authors and thousands of titles, with navigation features to lead you on a rich journey through some the best literature to grace our shelves.
