Brazos Bookstore Summer of Highsmith

Brazos Bookstore is thrilled to announce our Summer of Highsmith! From June through August we'll be reading and discussing the works of the acclaimed Texan author. Known for her psychological thrillers, Highsmith wrote for over 50 years (from 1942 to 1995), completing 22 novels and numerous short stories.


 

JUNE PICK: STRANGERS ON A TRAIN

Meeting on Wednesday, June 21 at 6:30pm

Strangers on a Train has lost none of its power to disturb…We will likely be reading Patricia Highsmith for the next one hundred years.” —Paula Hawkins

Just in time for the centennial celebration of groundbreaking noir fiction writer Patricia Highsmith comes a reissue of her propulsive, engrossing debut, Strangers on a Train, with a new introduction by best-selling author Paula Hawkins. Guy Haines and Charles Anthony Bruno are passengers on the same train. Haines is a successful architect in the midst of a divorce, Bruno a mysterious smooth-talker with a sadistic proposal: he’ll murder Haines’s wife if Haines will murder Bruno’s father. As Bruno carries out his twisted plan, Guy finds himself trapped in Highsmith’s perilous world, where, under the right circumstances, ordinary people are capable of extraordinary crimes. The inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1951 film, Strangers on a Train launched Highsmith’s prolific career, proving her a master at depicting the unsettling forces that tremble beneath the surface of everyday life.

 

JULY PICK: THE PRICE OF SALT (or CAROL)

Meeting on Wednesday, July 19 at 6:30pm

Patricia Highsmith’s story of romantic obsession may be one of the most important, but still largely unrecognized, novels of the twentieth century. First published in 1952 and touted as “the novel of a love that society forbids,” the book soon became a cult classic.

Based on a true story plucked from Highsmith’s own life, The Price of Salt (or Carol) tells the riveting drama of Therese Belivet, a stage designer trapped in a department-store day job, whose routine is forever shattered by a gorgeous epiphany—the appearance of Carol Aird, a customer who comes in to buy her daughter a Christmas toy. Therese begins to gravitate toward the alluring suburban housewife, who is trapped in a marriage as stultifying as Therese’s job. They fall in love and set out across the United States, ensnared by society’s confines and the imminent disapproval of others, yet propelled by their infatuation. The Price of Salt is a brilliantly written story that may surprise Highsmith fans and will delight those discovering her work.

 

AUGUST PICK: THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY

Meeting on Wednesday, August 16 at 6:30pm

It’s here, in the first volume of Patricia Highsmith’s five-book Ripley series, that we are introduced to the suave Tom Ripley, a young striver seeking to leave behind his past as an orphan bullied for being a “sissy.” Newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan, Ripley meets a wealthy industrialist who hires him to bring his playboy son, Dickie Greenleaf, back from gallivanting in Italy. Soon Ripley’s fascination with Dickie’s debonair lifestyle turns obsessive as he finds himself enraged by Dickie’s ambivalent affections for Marge, a charming American dilettante, and Ripley begins a deadly game. “Sinister and strangely alluring” (Mark Harris, Entertainment WeeklyThe Talented Mr. Ripley serves as an unforgettable introduction to this smooth confidence man, whose talent for self-invention is as unnerving—and unnervingly revealing of the American psyche—as ever.

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