The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith
Patricia Highsmith
W.W. Norton, $27.95 (cloth)
by James Sallis
A writer is a distinctive kind of loner—psychologically apart, yet committed to communication. This conflict seems particularly true of writers who simultaneously court and challenge genre conventions, people like Theodore Sturgeon, Chester Himes, Iain Sinclair, Jonathan Carroll, Jack O'Connell; often they struggle with self and with reader's expectations as much as with the material at hand. There's a gravity forever working to draw down both work and worker. Each new day, each new novel or essay, each new paragraph and page, requires renewed conviction—a new act of self-persuasion that this is worth doing, that what one does, matters. No surprise then that writers so often prove such a stubborn, contrary lot.
