The Talented Miss Highsmith

**Patricia Highsmith’s *The Price of Salt* is now a major motion picture *(Carol* ) starring Cate Blanchett and Mia Wasikowska, directed by Todd Hayes** A 2010 *New York Times* Notable Book **A 2010 Lambda Literary Award Winner** **A 2009 Edgar Award Nominee** **A 2009 Agatha Award Nominee** **A *Publishers Weekly* Pick of the Week** Patricia Highsmith, one of the great writers of twentieth-century American fiction, had a life as darkly compelling as that of her favorite hero-criminal, the talented Tom Ripley. Joan Schenkar maps out this richly bizarre life from her birth in Texas to Hitchcock’s filming of her first novel, *Strangers on a Train,* to her long, strange self-exile in Europe. We see her as a secret writer for the comics, a brilliant creator of disturbing fictions, and an erotic predator with dozens of women (and a few good men) on her love list. *The Talented Miss Highsmith* is the first literary biography with access to Highsmith’s whole story: her closest friends, her oeuvre, her archives. It’s a compulsive page-turner unlike any other, a book worthy of Highsmith herself.