<DIV><DIV><DIV><B>A 2010 Lambda Literary Award Winner<BR></B><B>A 2009 Edgar Award Nominee<BR></B><B>A 2009 Agatha Award Nominee<BR></B><B>A <I>Publishers Weekly</I> Pick of the Week<BR><BR></B>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, <I>Strangers on a Train,</I> 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. <I>The Talented Miss Highsmith</I> 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.</DIV></DIV></DIV>