Nothing That Meets the Eye (57 page)

Authors: Patricia Highsmith

BOOK: Nothing That Meets the Eye

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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B
orn in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, Patricia Highsmith spent much of her adult life in Switzerland and France. She was educated at Barnard College, where she studied English, Latin, and Greek. Her first novel, Strangers on a Train, published initially in 1950, proved to be a major commercial success and was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock. Despite this early recognition, Highsmith was unappreciated in the United States for the entire length of her career.

Writing under the pseudonym of Claire Morgan, she then published The Price of Salt in 1952, which had been turned down by her previous American publisher because of its frank exploration of homosexual themes. Her most popular literary creation was Tom Ripley, the dapper sociopath who first debuted in her 1955 novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley. She followed with four other Ripley novels. Posthumously made into a major motion picture, The Talented Mr. Ripley has helped bring about a renewed appreciation of Highsmith's work in the United States, as has the posthumous publication of The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith, which received widespread acclaim when it was published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2001.

The author of more than twenty books, Highsmith has won the O. Henry Memorial Award, the Edgar Allan Poe Award, Le Grand Prix de LittÃ©rature PoliciÃ¨re, and the Award of the Crime Writers' Association of Great Britain. She died in Switzerland on February 4, 1995, and her literary archives are maintained in Berne.

Further praise for Patricia Highsmith
and
Nothing That Meets the Eye

“With a hard, keen eye, Highsmith crafts beautifully warped creatures and dares us to step inside their minds.”

âFrank Sennett,
Booklist

“Readers will revel in this fabulous survey of mostly unpublished work.”

â
Pages

“This is a riveting collection of short stories and should not be missed.”

âTeresa DeCrescenzo,
Lesbian News

“Highsmith writes the verbal equivalent of a drugâeasy to consume, darkly euphoric, totally addictive. . . . Highsmith belongs in the moody company of Dostoevsky or Angela Carter.”

â
Time Out

“Highsmith's writing is wicked . . . it puts a spell on you, after which you feel altered, even tainted. . . . A great American writer is back to stay.”

â
Entertainment Weekly

“In every story, Highsmith demonstrates her inimitable talent for making even the coldest characters galvanizing.”

â
Publishers Weekly

“No one has created psychological suspense more densely and deliciously satisfying.”

â
Vogue

“Read it at your own risk, knowing that this is not everyone's cup of poisoned tea.”

â
New York Times

“These tales will make you shiver and smile.”

âC.M.,
O Magazine

“Highsmith's gift as a suspense novelist is to show how this secret desire can bridge the normal and abnormal. . . . She seduces us with whisky-smooth surfaces only to lead us blindly into darker terrain.”

â
Commercial Appeal

“Patricia Highsmith's novels are peerlessly disturbing . . . bad dreams that keep us thrashing for the rest of the night.”

â
The New Yorker

“Highsmith had a profound understanding of the human psyche.”

âLaura Cassidy,
Seattle Weekly

“Though Highsmith would no doubt disclaim any kinship with Jonathan Swift or Evelyn Waugh, the best of [her work] is in the same tradition. . . . It is Highsmith's dark and sometimes savage humor, and the intelligence that informs her precise and hard-edged prose, which puts one in mind of those authors.”

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Newsday

“For eliciting the menace that lurks in familiar surroundings, there's no one like Patricia Highsmith.”

â
Time

“A writer who has created a world of her ownâa world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger . . . Patricia Highsmith is the poet of apprehension.”

âGraham Greene

“Patricia Highsmith is often called a mystery or crime writer, which is a bit like calling Picasso a draftsman.”

â
Cleveland Plain Dealer

“[Highsmith] has an uncanny feeling for the rhythms of terror.”

â
Times Literary Supplement

“To call Patricia Highsmith a thriller writer is true but not the whole truth: her books have stylistic texture, psychological depth, mesmeric readability.”

â
The Sunday Times
(London)

Frontispiece: Patricia Highsmith, circa 1942. Courtesy Swiss Literary Archive, Berne.

English translation of Afterword copyright Â©Â 2002 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

First published as a Norton paperback 2003

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write
to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

Book design by Blue Shoe Studio

Production manager: Julia Druskin

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Highsmith, Patricia, 1921â

Nothing that meets the eye : the uncollected stories of Patricia Highsmith.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-393-05187-0

I. Title.

PS3558.I366 N67 2002Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â 2002070121

ISBN 0-393-32500-8 pbk.

eISBN: 978-0-393-34566-7

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.