"Highsmith is no more a practitioner of the murder mystery genre...than are Doestoevsky, Faulkner and Camus."—Joan Smith,
Los Angeles Times
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
, 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.