Patricia Highsmith
Her Diaries and Notebooks, 1941–1995
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Narrated by:
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Caroline Hewitt
About this listen
Available for the centenary of her birth, Patricia Highsmith’s diaries “offer the most complete picture ever published” of the canonical author (New York Times).
Relegated during her lifetime to the pulpy genre of mystery, Patricia Highsmith has emerged since her death in 1995 as one of “our greatest modernist writers” (Gore Vidal). Presented for the first time, this one-volume assemblage of her diaries and notebooks—posthumously discovered behind Highsmith’s linens and culled from more than 8,000 pages by her devoted editor, Anna von Planta—traces the mesmerizing double-life of an artist who “[worked] like mad to be something”.
Beginning in 1941 during her junior year at Barnard, the diaries exhibit the intoxicating “atmosphere of nameless dread” (Boston Globe) that permeates classics such as Strangers on a Train and the Ripley series. In her skewering of McCarthy-era America, her prickly disparagement of contemporary art, her fixation on love and writing, and ever-percolating prejudices, the famously secretive Highsmith reveals the roots of her psychological angst and acuity. In one of the most thoroughly enjoyable literary diaries to publish in generations, at last we see how Patricia Highsmith became Patricia Highsmith.
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Two sisters, small-town Ontario, 1934. Canadian author Richard Wright tells their story, from the ordinary to the extraoridinary with an eye for the commonplace and poignant sense of the larger undercurrents that change people's lives.
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charming intimate refreshing
- By L on 09-10-04
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Youngblood Hawke
- By: Herman Wouk
- Narrated by: Nick Sullivan
- Length: 41 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Arthur Youngblood Hawke, an ex-Navy man moves from rural Kentucky to New York to assault the citadel of New York publishing with his first novel, an oversized manuscript that becomes an instant success. Toasted by critics and swept along on a tide of popularity, he gives himself over to the lush life that gilds artistic success. Love comes with an affair with an older married woman and an unfulfilled flame with his editor, while wealth pours in with the publication of his second novel, and participation in real-estate developments.
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More than a good yarn
- By Arken on 10-24-18
By: Herman Wouk
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Tender Is the Night
- By: F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Narrated by: Therese Plummer
- Length: 12 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Set on the French Riviera in the late 1920s, Tender Is the Night is the tragic romance of the young actress Rosemary Hoyt and the stylish American couple Dick and Nicole Diver. A brilliant young psychiatrist at the time of his marriage, Dick is both husband and doctor to Nicole, whose wealth goads him into a lifestyle not his own, and whose growing strength highlights Dick's harrowing demise. A profound study of the romantic concept of character - lyrical, expansive, and hauntingly evocative.
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Subtle yet grand
- By jb on 10-12-15
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The Golden Notebook
- By: Doris Lessing
- Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson
- Length: 27 hrs and 33 mins
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Author Anna Wulf attempts to overcome writer’s block by writing a comprehensive "golden notebook" that draws together the preoccupations of her life, each of which is examined in a different notebook. Anna’s struggle to unify the various strands of her life – emotional, political, and professional – amasses into a fascinating encyclopaedia of female experience in the ‘50s.
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Transcendent narration of a masterpiece.
- By @vmarinelli on 07-03-12
By: Doris Lessing
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The Lost Manuscript
- By: Cathy Bonidan
- Narrated by: Elodie Yung, Rupert Degas, Cécile Delepière, and others
- Length: 5 hrs and 21 mins
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When Anne-Lise Briard books a room at the Beau Rivage Hotel for her vacation on the Brittany coast, she has no idea this trip will start her on the path to unearthing a mystery. In search of something to read, she opens up her bedside table drawer in her hotel room, and inside she finds an abandoned manuscript. Halfway through the pages, an address is written. She sends pages to the address, in hopes of potentially hearing a response from the unknown author. But not before she reads the story and falls in love with it. The response, which she receives a few days later, astonishes her.
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Book of the year
- By Kmax on 06-24-21
By: Cathy Bonidan
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The Zahir
- By: Paulo Coelho
- Narrated by: Derek Jacobi, Emilia Fox
- Length: 5 hrs and 16 mins
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It begins with a glimpse or a passing thought. It ends in obsession. One day a renowned author discovers that his wife, a war correspondent, has disappeared leaving no trace. Though time brings more success and new love, he remains mystified - and increasingly fascinated - by her absence. Was she kidnapped, blackmailed, or simply bored with their marriage? The unrest she causes is as strong as the attraction she exerts.
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Beautiful and deep read!
- By Top 1% Buyer on 09-13-15
By: Paulo Coelho
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Burr
- A Novel (Narratives of Empire, Book 1)
- By: Gore Vidal
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 21 hrs and 20 mins
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Here is an extraordinary portrait of one of the most complicated - and misunderstood - figures among the Founding Fathers. In 1804, while serving as vice president, Aaron Burr fought a duel with his political nemesis, Alexander Hamilton, and killed him. In 1807, he was arrested, tried, and acquitted of treason. In 1833, Burr is newly married, an aging statesman considered a monster by many. But he is determined to tell his own story, and he chooses to confide in a young New York City journalist. Burr is the first novel in Gore Vidal's Narratives of Empire series.
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Finally! Vidal's Great Take on the Life of Burr
- By John Norton on 06-12-19
By: Gore Vidal
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The Love Note
- By: Tracy Rees
- Narrated by: Jasmine Blackborow
- Length: 14 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Perfect for fans of The Keeper of Lost Things and The Villa in Italy. Blue lives a charmed life. From her family's townhouse in Richmond, she lives a life of luxury and couldn't want for anything - well, on the surface at least. Then, on the night of her 21st birthday, her father makes a startling toast: he will give his daughter's hand to whichever man can capture her heart best in the form of a love letter. But Blue has other ideas, and, unwilling to play at her father's bewildering games, she sets out on her own path to find her own destiny....
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The Love Note❣️
- By Leslie Gail Mnich on 10-25-20
By: Tracy Rees
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The Setting Sun
- New Directions Book
- By: Osamu Dazai
- Narrated by: June Angela
- Length: 4 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Set in the early postwar years, it probes the destructive effects of war and the transition from a feudal Japan to an industrial society. Ozamu Dazai died, a suicide, in 1948. But the influence of his book has made "people of the setting sun" a permanent part of the Japanese language, and his heroine, Kazuko, a young aristocrat who deliberately abandons her class, a symbol of the anomie which pervades so much of the modern world.
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MORE OSAMU DAZAI TRANSLATIONS PLEASE!!!!!
- By Lucky on 10-19-22
By: Osamu Dazai
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Unfortunate choice of narrator
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A Suspension of Mercy
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In A Suspension of Mercy, a masterpiece of noir fantasy, Highsmith revels in eliciting the unsettling psychological forces that lurk beneath the surface of everyday contemporary life.
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The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
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Published in their entirety, Sylvia Plath's journals provide an intimate portrait of the writer who was to produce in the last seven months of her life some of the most extraordinary poems of the 20th century. Faithfully transcribed from the 23 journals and journal fragments owned by Smith College, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath includes two journals that Plath's husband, Ted Hughes, unsealed just before his death in 1998.
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narrator almost made me hate one of my favorites
- By Anonymous User on 09-02-20
By: Sylvia Plath, and others
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Excellent Selection!
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Here is the exciting culmination of Ali Smith's celebrated Seasonal Quartet, a series of stand-alone novels, separate but interconnected (as the seasons are), wide-ranging in timescale and light-footed through histories.
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terrific book, beautifully read.
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narrator almost made me hate one of my favorites
- By Anonymous User on 09-02-20
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Deep Water
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In Deep Water, set in the small town of Little Wesley, Vic and Melinda Meller's loveless marriage is held together only by a precarious arrangement whereby in order to avoid the messiness of divorce, Melinda is allowed to take any number of lovers as long as she does not desert her family. Eventually, Vic tries to win her back by asserting himself through a tall tale of murder - one that soon comes true.
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Classic Highsmith
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With an eye for rendering the timely in a timeless way and enchanting audiences with lyrical prose and grace, Ali Smith's ambitious Seasonal Quartet—a series of four stand-alone novels, separate but interconnected—artfully guided us through #MeToo, Brexit, the refugee crisis, a global pandemic, and more. Now, Smith's highly anticipated Companion Piece looks to the future and builds upon this "time-sensitive project". This new novel stands apart from the Quartet, which remains discrete unto itself.
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She said she said she said
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In Patricia Highsmith's debut novel, we encounter Guy Haines and Charles Anthony Bruno, passengers on the same train. But while Guy is a successful architect in the midst of a divorce, Bruno turns out to be a sadistic psychopath who manipulates Guy into swapping murders with him. As Bruno carries out his twisted plan, Guy is trapped in Highsmith's perilous world - where, under the right circumstances, anybody is capable of murder.
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Not my cup of tea
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Autumn
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Incredible use of language
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Set in Tunisia in the mid-1960s, this is the story of Howard Ingham, an American writer who has gone abroad to gather material for a movie too sordid to be set in America. Ingham is cool toward the girlfriend he left behind in New York - but his feelings start to change when she doesn't answer his increasingly aggravated letters and the filmmaker who hired Ingham fails to show in Tunisia.
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Engrossing
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There and Back
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Over the next ten years, we watch through Michael's eyes as the world reels from the successive shocks of September 11, the 7/7 bombings and the global financial crash. With the warmth and gentle empathy that have endeared millions of fans to him over the decades, Michael documents the day-to-day detail of living in a world buffeted by such powerful winds of change.
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I never knew he lived so close to me .
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Beautiful Shadow
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Patricia Highsmith had more than her fair share of secrets. During her life, she felt uncomfortable about discussing the source of her fiction and refused to answer questions about her private life. Yet after her death in February 1995, Highsmith left behind a vast archive of personal documents which detail the links between her life and her work. Drawing on these intimate papers, together with material gleaned from her closest friends and lovers, Andrew Wilson has written the first biography of an author described by Graham Greene as the “poet of apprehension.”
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Carol - The Price of Salt
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A chance encounter between two lonely women leads to a passionate romance in this lesbian cult classic. Therese, a struggling young sales clerk, and Carol, a homemaker in the midst of a bitter divorce, abandon their oppressive daily routines for the freedom of the open road, where their love can blossom. But their newly discovered bliss is shattered when Carol is forced to choose between her child and her lover.
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I can't stop thinking about this book...
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Robert E. Lee is remembered by history as a tragic figure, stoic and brave but distant and enigmatic. Using dozens of previously unpublished letters as departure points, Pryor produces a stunning personal account of Lee's military ability, his beliefs, and his time, shedding new light on every aspect of the complex and contradictory general's life story.
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Pure hatred
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The GK Chesterton Collection
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Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) was a British writer, philosopher, lay theologian, and literary critic. Chesterton wrote around 80 books, several hundred poems, some 200 short stories, several plays, plus 4,000 essays and newspaper columns. He was a columnist for the Daily News and The Illustrated London News.
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The reader makes the difference
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The Letters of Jane Austen
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“I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.” Jane Austen at her witty, observant, intelligent, and sympathetic best, in this collection of her letters written to family and friends. Compiled by her niece Fanny Knight’s son Edward Hugessen Knatchbull-Hugessen (the first Baron Brabourne), and edited by Sarah Chauncey Woolsey, this collection includes a preface written by the editor and notes from Lord Brabourne. It was originally published in 1892.
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To be in the life of this wonderful writer
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The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fable that range from antebellum New York to the late 20th-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. An air force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits 100 years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light.
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eye opening
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What listeners say about Patricia Highsmith
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- MM
- 07-20-23
The raw, unfiltered, and unapologetic thoughts of great mind and ground-breaking author.
You might find your jaw dropping at quite a bit of the entries herein but when you do, maybe ask yourself this. Is it possible that Patricia Highsmith is simply being more candid with her views than most intellectuals would risk letting the world discover? Is she writing things many people think, more or less, in moments of sarcasm, fear, or other emotional states that most never dare let themselves say out loud?
I think it is important to remember that these are the private and once-hidden diaries of a writer who, at one point, planned to have them burned upon her death. Shortly before her end, the editor of this book reveals however that Highsmith donated the pages to the preservationists, even so, not necessarily with the intent of having them published. These diaries, were the personal and private tools of an artist. They are not written in narrative or story-driven format though they serve to add rich psychological context to the author’s life story.
Did she save these pages from the flames out of a covert narcissism that you may begin to suspect of her on one page, just before she surprises you with demonstrations of deep empathy and humanity on the next? I believe her decision was more courageous than anything else, as who would ever want to possibly open up a can of worms on their legacy in the way unfiltered thoughts and unedited works can? I do imagine that when faced with this decision, it was easier for her to simply hand over all 8000 pages of these writings vs. burning them all or attempting to edit them down.
For those searching for a faster and fuller understanding of Highsmith’s life and accomplishments, I would recommend best-selling biographies such as the artfully written, The Talented Miss Highsmith (which sources these diaries) by Joan Schenkar and the feature documentary, Loving Patricia Highsmith.
Reading these journals though, in concert with the historical biographies and Highsmith’s literary works, gives readers, fans, and historians the ultimate insight as to who Highsmith truly was though the internal voice of her struggles, joys, and inspirations.
These diary pages can further serve to shed light on and provide a greater context to some of the more controversial statements she made, later in life, as countless pages act as historic evidence indicating that Highsmith held very socially progressive and forward views, the vast majority of her life. At about 1970 however, we see how, almost overnight, several deaths and a recent divorce-like heartbreak suddenly spark an onset of graphic nightmares, a whole new level of morbid thinking, and the onset of a remarkable shift in her personality.
I believe that all artists can learn from Highsmith’s philosophical and literary observations, self-proclaimed life-mistakes, and where the sum total of her mind’s dialogue took her by the end of her life.
On one level, I take from these pages, cautionary tales for creatives as it is so often conflict, the chasing of newness, seeking muses, and dark ponderings that artists source, while at a massive, personal cost. On the other, I see a first-person story of triumph, from a successful author who dared touch on subject matters, love, and relationships in ways that were decades before her time.
Regardless, in reading these tomes, you will be entering a fascinating, often morbid, and very existential mind.
Take your time with this one, you may need too!
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- Shelley Winchester
- 12-26-21
40 hours of neurotic blather
I tried to listen on multiple occasions and under different circumstances. No matter. One must listen to the author refer to herself ad nauseam, in the third person, whilst bemoaning the decrepitude of society and petty contrivances. OMG just make it stop! Deleting this file, as one shouldn't waste perfectly good digital capacity on empty platitudes.
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