Nothing That Meets the Eye: The Uncollected Stories of Patricia Highsmith - Hardcover

Highsmith, Patricia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0747576874 ISBN 13: 9780747576877

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2005

Synopsis

Book by PATRICIA HIGHSMITH

About this title

About the Author:

Patricia Highsmith (1921–1995) was the author of more than twenty novels, including Strangers on a Train, The Price of Salt, The Blunderer and The Talented Mr. Ripley, as well as numerous short stories.

From Booklist:

*Starred Review* Most of the stories in this collection, written between 1938 and 1982, are almost sentimental in their brutal unsentimentality. With a hard, keen eye, Highsmith crafts beautifully warped creatures and dares us to step inside their minds. Most of the characters are misfits, some desperate to change their lives, others with no idea how to start. Even when nothing dreadful happens, as in the early "Where the Door Is Always Open and the Welcome Mat Is Out"--in which a Midwest transplant attempts to justify her busy-empty Manhattan life to a visiting relative (and to herself)--the stories nonetheless inspire a delicious sense of dread. And when terrible things do occur, they hit the reader between the eyes like a stockyard hammer: in "The Mightiest Morning," a man is driven from a town after innocently spending his days with a young girl who befriends him; in "The Car," another man is welcomed by a mother who fails to recognize his bad intentions toward her little daughter. Highsmith never asks us to sympathize with her evil characters, but she does show--through the petty, mean-spirited, thoughtless actions of others--that much of their hatred for society is justified. It's perhaps her most frightening, depressing motif. Frank Sennett
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About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0747576874
• ISBN 13: 9780747576877
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 464