Patricia Highsmith, página 5 de 15

Robert Forester, un hombre tímido, ingeniero aeronáutico, que abandona Nueva York porque ya no puede soportar las disputas con su mujer, se refugia en un lugar de Pennsylvania para trabajar y encuentra sosiego contemplando a través de las ventanas de su casita a una muchacha desconocida que se afana en las tareas domésticas. Pero ella y su novio descubren que alguien espía la casa, y la joven sorprende un día a Forester. Entonces comienzan los problemas y el ingeniero se encuentra, de pronto, atrapado en una pesadilla.

La intriga de esta novela está basada en la idea de un crimen sin móviles, un crimen perfecto: dos desconocidos acuerdan asesinar cada uno al enemigo del otro, proporcionándose así una coartada indestructible. Bruno: alcohólico con problemas edípicos, homosexual latente viaja en el mismo tren que Guy :ambicioso, trabajador, adaptado. Empieza a conversar y Bruno, demoníacamente, fuerza al otro a hablar, a descubrir su punto débil, la única grieta en su ordenada existencia: Guy quisiera verse libre de su mujer, que le traicionó y que puede ahora obstaculizar su prometedor futuro. Bruno le propone un pacto: él matará a la mujer y Guy, a su vez, al padre de Bruno, a quien éste odia. Guy rechaza tan absurdo plan y lo olvida, pero no así Bruno, quien, una vez cumplida su parte, reclama al horrorizado Guy que cumpla con la suya...

A brilliant collection of stories, based on natural and unnatural catastrophes and exploring the macabre and its meaning. The stories range from midnight revelling in an East Austrian cemetery to a picnic for "crackpots" on the White House lawn. They also include the source of the tell-tale smells of Nabuti, the unsporting hiding place chosen by the Nuclear Control Committee for radio-active waste, and the crumbling defence tactics of a luxury high-rise against a crawling army that fumigation cannot kill. Other tales tell of how magic and horror stories followed in the wake of a furious whale, how miracle and revolution were launched when a Pope stubbed his toe, and how happiness came to a woman who thought she was Cleopatra.

Therese first glimpses Carol in the New York department store where she is working as a sales assistant. Carol is choosing a present for her daughter; she looks preoccupied, exuding an aura of elegance as perfect as a secret. Standing there at the counter, Therese suddenly feels wholly innocent - wholly unprepared for the first shock of love. Therese was nineteen, and loved by a young man she cared about, but could not desire. Carol was a sophisticated married woman. Now Therese seemed to have no other purpose to her life other than their meeting First published under a pseudonym in 1952, Carol is a love story told with compelling wit and eroticism, and consummate tenderness.

Ray Garetts junge Frau hat sich umgebracht. Nun verfolgt ihn sein Schwiegervater hasserfüllt, weil er glaubt, Garett trage die Schuld am Tod des einzigen, geliebten Kindes. In Rom wird Garett bei einem Mordanschlag nur leicht verletzt. Statt sich jedoch vom Schwiegervater fernzuhalten, reist Garett ihm nach Venedig nach, um ihn von seiner Unschuld zu überzeugen.

David Kelsey has an invincible conviction that life is going to work out just as he has planned it. Even though his one true love, the brilliant, beautiful Annabelle, has married another man, that can't possibly be the end of their relationship, can it? They can certainly still be friends. And even though she is pregnant with her husband Gerald's baby, that surely doesn't mean she won't one day get back together with David, does it? David is sure she'll take him back, and, under an alias, is setting up a wonderful home for the two of them in a town close by. And everything is just about going to plan until things take a murderous turn, leaving David a desperate man on the run.

With Norton's publication of The Black House, Patricia Highsmith's entire body of work is now back in print. First published in 1981, this volume is one of Highsmith's most nuanced and psychologically suspenseful works. The stories in and The Black House mine classic Highsmith terrain as they sketch the lives of suburban dwellers that appear quite normal at first but unravel to reveal their proximity to the macabre. This collection is a perfect example of Highsmith's view of human nature and a fitting capstone to the reintroduction of one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. Author Biography: 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.

Some neighbours are playing Scrabble one evening when their cat drags into the house not a bird, or some other catch, but human fingers. A guest arrives at a dinner party where he is not welcome, and his hosts conspire to find and attack his Achilles heel. The crew of the Emma C rescue a beautiful girl floating unconscious in the sea and tension explodes between the men on board. A childless thirtysomething couple decide to invite two elderly folk to live with them, but have they been too generous? In this collection of Patricia Highsmith's wonderfully unsettling short stories, people's motives are frequently twisted and no occurrence is without a sinister underlying meaning.

This volume of stories, many of them published here for the first time, spans almost fifty years of Highsmith's career. Showing the evolution of her writing from her days as a struggling freelancer living in New York in the 1940s to her later years when she was an expatriate in Switzerland, they reveal her trademark dark themes, such as the married man who dates women out of secret revenge against their sex, and the suicidal woman who finds that in her despair she is a sexual magnet. These are suspenseful, playful, taut and psychologically gripping stories, evidence of an extraordinary talent.

La reputación de Vic es intachable; por el contrario, la de Melinda, su mujer, es bastante dudosa. Guapa y divertida, tiene un amante tras otro y no se molesta en ocultarlo.Vic, curiosamente, parece comprenderlo y hasta encontrarlo gracioso. Un dia Vic le cuenta a Joel, el amante de turno de Melinda, que ha matado a uno de los amigos de su esposa. Joel le cree, se asusta y se marcha, y poco despues la inquieta Melinda vuelve a las andadas con Charley, que una noche se ahoga en una piscina. Melinda asegura que ha sido un asesinato y que el responsable es su marido. Pero ¿quien creeria a Melinda? ¿Y alguien tan civilizado como Vic seria capaz de hacer algo asi? Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995) cultiva un particular y perturbador genero negro centrado en el sondeo de sentimientos y en el retrato psicologico.

La reputación de Vic es intachable; por el contrario, la de Melinda, su mujer, es bastante dudosa. Guapa y divertida, tiene un amante tras otro y no se molesta en ocultarlo. Vic, curiosamente, parece comprenderlo y hasta encontrarlo gracioso. Un dia Vic le cuenta a Joel, el amante de turno de Melinda, que ha matado a uno de los amigos de su esposa. Joel le cree, se asusta y se marcha, y poco despues la inquieta Melinda vuelve a las andadas con Charley, que una noche se ahoga en una piscina. Melinda asegura que ha sido un asesinato y que el responsable es su marido. Pero ¿quien creeria a Melinda? ¿Y alguien tan civilizado como Vic seria capaz de hacer algo asi?

Howard Ingham finds it strange that no one has written to him since he arrived in Tunisia - neither the film director that he is supposed to be meeting in Tunis, nor his lover in New York who is, he hopes, missing him. While he waits around at a beach resort, unable to get going on the film script he is there to write, he starts work on a new novel, about a man living an amoral double life. Howard also befriends a fellow American who has a taste for Scotch and a suspicious interest in the Soviet Union, and a Dane who appears to distrust Arabs intensely. When bad news finally arrives from home, Howard thinks he may as well stay and continue writing, despite the tremors in the air of violence, tensions and ambiguous morals.

Edith Howland's diary is her most precious possession, and as she is moving house she is making sure it's safe. A suburban housewife in fifties America, she is moving to Brunswick with her husband Brett and her beloved son, Cliffie, to start a new life for them all. She is optimistic, but she has high hopes most of all for her new venture with Brett, a local newspaper, the Brunswick Corner Bugle. Life seems full of promise, and indeed, to read her diary, filled with her most intimate feelings and revelations, you would never think otherwise. Strange then, that reality is so dangerously different

City lawyer Walter Stackhouse desperately needs to escape his marriage. His wife Clara is neurotic, vindictive and has been systematically alienating all of his friends. She is ruining his life, and it's small wonder then that he finds himself drawn to gentle, sympathetic Ellie. So when Clara jealously makes a failed suicide attempt, Walter realises just what life might be like without her. Meanwhile, the story of a New York woman brutally murdered by her husband has been making headlines and firing Walter's imagination, and he suddenly sees an opportunity to put an end to his torment. But does he really have the courage to get rid of Clara? Or will he be too much of blunderer to see it through?

Tom Ripley is quietly living a life of luxury at his chateau at Villeperce, and, as ever, is keeping one step ahead of the law - he has, after all, a past that would not bear too much close scrutiny The fifth novel featuring the protagonist Tom Ripley finds the sophisticated and amoral American expatriate being harassed by David Pritchard, a fellow American whose boorishness marks him as something of Ripley's alter-ego. Inexplicably familiar with all the incriminating details of Ripley's past, Pritchard is determined to expose him. He shadows Ripley's every move, first spying on him at home in France and then following him to Morocco. Tensions build on the return to Villeperce as Pritchard sets out to locate a body Ripley would prefer remain hidden in a nearby river