Eleven

by Patricia Highsmith, Graham Greene (Foreword by)

Overview

Short stories of suspense by the author of Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley—“a brilliant collection” with a foreword by Graham Greene (The Sunday Times).
 
Master of tension Patricia Highsmith is best known for her novels of ever-increasing suspense, but she is equally adept at the short story, where “she is after the quick kill rather than the slow encirclement of the reader.” Eleven is Highsmith’s first collection of short stories—dark masterpieces of obsession and foreboding, violence and instability (Graham Greene, from the foreword).
 
In these pages, naturalists meet gruesome ends and unhinged heroes disturb our sympathies; simple cases of murder turn out to be something even more sinister, and the cruelties of childhood come to unsettling life. This is a captivating, important collection from “one of the truly brilliant short-story writers of the twentieth century” (Otto Penzler).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802195517
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	07/12/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	159,107
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Suspense novels are often described as "chilling," but no one turns down the reader's emotional thermostat quite like Patricia Highsmith, author of such haunting psychological thrillers as Strangers on a Train and creator of the sociopathic series protagonist Tom Ripley. During her life, Highsmith was a popular author in Europe, where she lived; in her native United States, however, her books went sporadically in and out of print for decades. Now, the writer whom Graham Greene called "the poet of apprehension" has finally gained recognition in the States -- not only as a master of the suspense genre, but as a literary author of rare talent.

Highsmith grew up in Texas and New York, but spent most of her adult life in England, France and Switzerland. By most accounts she was a loner who avoided other people, including other writers; but she did have early help in her career from Truman Capote, who got her a stint at the Yaddo writers' colony in New York. Her first novel, Strangers on a Train, tells the story of an architect and a psychopath who meet on a train and "swap" murders. The book gained Highsmith considerable fame, especially after it was made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock. A second novel, The Price of Salt, was printed under a pseudonym after her first publishers turned it down. Though her subsequent works didn't sell well in her home country, she kept turning out the kinds of novels and short stories the New Yorker called "bad dreams that keep us thrashing for the rest of the night."

Several movies have been loosely based on Highsmith's books, including Danny DeVito's Hitchcock spoof Throw Momma From the Train; Wim Wenders' The American Friend, adapted from Ripley's Game; and Purple Noon, a French film based on The Talented Mr. Ripley. But it was Academy Award-winning director Anthony Minghella's lush screen adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley, released four years after Highsmith's death and 44 years after the book's publication, that introduced Highsmith to a wider audience and led to a rediscovery of her works.

Subtle enough for a seminar yet entertaining enough for the beach, Highsmith's coolly narrated tales of terror display an observant eye for social behavior as well as individual psychology. Most books in the suspense genre provide a hero whose fundamental honesty and decency stand as bulwarks against the evil he or she confronts. But in a Highsmith novel, the reader is alone with victim and victimizer -- and an unsettling sense of empathy with both.

As Francis Wyndham has noted, Highsmith's "peculiar brand of horror comes less from the inevitability of disaster, than from the ease with which it might have been avoided. The evil of her agents is answered by the impotence of her patients -- this is not the attraction of opposites, but in some subtle way the call of like to like. When they finally clash in the climactic catastrophe, the reader's sense of satisfaction may derive from sources as dark as those which motivate Patricia Highsmith's destroyers and their fascinated victims."

Date of Birth:

January 19, 1921

Date of Death:

February 4, 1995

Place of Birth:

Fort Worth, Texas

Place of Death:

Locarno, Switzerland

Education:

B.A., Barnard College, 1942

Table of Contents

Foreword Graham Greene ix

Stories Patricia Highsmith: The Snail-Watcher 1

The Birds Poised to Fly 11

The Terrapin 26

When the Fleet was in at Mobile 44

The Quest for Blank Claveringi 68

The Cries of Love 87

Among thy Green Braes Afton 98

The Heroine 113

Another Bridge to Cross 133

The Barbarians 156

The Empty Birdhouse 173

Editorial Reviews

What is striking about these stories is their integrity: they are all of a piece; they grow, with that tensed-spring inevitability of the unfolding rose observed by elapsed-time photography; together they are a brilliant collection.” —The Sunday Times (London)

“The mood of nagging apprehension is consistent, skillfully underplayed so that just the right amount of chill is induced with an economy of means.” —J. R. Frankes, The New York Times Book Review

“Highsmith is the poet of apprehension rather than fear. . . . In her short stories Highsmith naturally has to adopt a different method. She is after the quick kill rather than the slow encirclement of the reader, and how admirably and with what field-craft she hunts us down.” —Graham Greene

“Highsmith’s genius is in presenting fantasy’s paradox: successes are not what they seem . . . Where in the traditional fairy tale the heroine turns the toad into a prince, in Highsmith’s fable the prince becomes a toad—success is nearly always fatal. . . . Combining the best features of the suspense genre with the best of existential fiction—a reflection—the stories are fabulous, in all senses of that word.” —Paul Theroux

"A brilliant collection.” — The Sunday Times (UK)

“One of the truly brilliant short-story writers of the 20th century.” —Otto Penzler

"She’s sui generis, a writer of almost occult power.”—Richard Rayner, Los Angeles Times

From the Publisher