Nothing That Meets the Eye: The Uncollected Stories of Patricia Highsmith FROM THE PUBLISHER
The Patricia Highsmith renaissance continues with Nothing That Meets the Eye, a brilliant collection of twenty-eight psychologically penetrating stories, a great majority of which are published for the first time in this collection.This volume spans almost fifty years of Highsmith's career and establishes her as a permanent member of our American literary canon, as attested by recent publication of two of these stories in The New Yorker and Harper's. The stories assembled in Nothing That Meets the Eye, written between 1938 and 1982, are vintage Highsmith: a gigolo-like psychopath preys on unfulfilled career women; a lonely spinster's fragile hold on reality is tethered to the bottle; an estranged postal worker invents homicidal fantasies about his coworkers. While some stories anticipate the diabolical narratives of the Ripley novels, others possess a Capra-like sweetness that forces us to see the author in a new light. From this new collection, a remarkable portrait of the American psyche at mid-century emerges, unforgettably distilled by the inimitable eye of Patricia Highsmith. A New York Times Notable Book and a Washington Post Rave of 2002.
About the Author:: Patricia Highsmith is the author of such classics as Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley. She died in 1995 in Locarno, Switzerland.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
Following on the heels of The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith (2001) comes Nothing That Meets the Eye: The Uncollected Stories of Patricia Highsmith, with an afterword by Paul Ingendaay and notes on the stories by Anna von Planta. Most of these 28 tales, which Highsmith (1921-1995) wrote between 1938 and 1982, are previously unpublished.
Library Journal
The late, prolific Highsmith is best known to readers for the canny, resourceful, elegant, and amoral Mr. Ripley (from her books; forget the movie please!). And, to writers, for her elegant, crafted prose. The novel form aside, the short story might be her best medium, riveting attention on her twists (plot and psychological), her use of language, and her experiments with viewpoint. Of the 28 stories collected here, many were previously published, but none are readily available. Those in the first section (to 1948) show a surprising attention to women's viewpoints and a developing sense of the illuminative power of a single moment, as in "The Still Point of the Turning World." The second section (from 1952 on) is more male-dominated and characteristic, and the best stories here (like "A Girl Like Phyl" where the illumination is ironic and shatters a life) could really be said to burn with Pater's "hard, gemlike flame." Remarkable; highly recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/02.] Robert E. Brown, Minoa Lib., NY Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Following on the heels of The Collected Stories of Patricia Highsmith (2001), this gathering will be a revelation to readers who've bracketed Highsmith (1921-95) purely as a psychological suspense novelist, or indeed as a novelist. Though she did not publish her first volume of stories until 20 years after her groundbreaking first novel, Strangers on a Train (1950), Highsmith considered the short story, like poetry, a necessary discipline for her writing and returned to the form constantly. Another revelation is provided by the division of these 28 tales-about half the author's previously uncollected short fiction-into early and late (basically, pre- and post-Strangers). Early stories like "The Still Point of the Turning World" and "Doorbell for Louisa," often focusing, as Paul Irgendaay's afterword points out, on faded females, are more interested in focusing a mood or zone of consciousness than unfolding a narrative. The later stories feature more familiar Highsmith types-men like the petty thief in "A Dangerous Hobby" and the haunted divorcﾽ in "The Second Cigarette" whose hollow lives are exposed by insolent chance. What remains constant throughout is life's shocking arbitrariness, which renders even the rare happy endings of stories like "A Bird in Hand" (whose hero passes off store-bought birds as duplicates of families' beloved pets) and "Born Failure" (whose sad-sack hero discovers his happiness by messing up his one piece of good fortune) as depressing in their own way as the suicides that more frequently provide her endings. One final revelation is how keen a judge Highsmith was of her work. With a few exceptions like "The Trouble with Mrs. Blynn, the Trouble with the World" and"A Girl Like Phyl," which cram a life's worth of devastation into a few pages, these stories are a cut below the seven volumes she collected herself. Valuable for the light it sheds on its creator, then, but not a collection that will enlarge Highsmith's formidable reputation.
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