Authors: Patricia Highsmith

Glass Cell (25 page)

P
RAISE FOR
P
ATRICIA
H
IGHSMITH

“Patricia Highsmith’s novels are peerlessly disturbing . . . bad dreams that keep us thrashing for the rest of the night.”

—
The New Yorker

“The feeling of menace behind most Highsmith novels, the sense that ideas and attitudes alien to the reasonable everyday ordering of society are suggested, has made many readers uneasy. One closes most of her books with a feeling that the world is more dangerous than one had ever imagined.”

—Julian Symons,
New York Times Book Review

“Murder, in Patricia Highsmith’s hands, is made to occur almost as casually as the bumping of a fender or a bout of food poisoning. This downplaying of the dramatic . . . has been much praised, as has the ordinariness of the details with which she depicts the daily lives and mental processes of her psychopaths. Both undoubtedly contribute to the domestication of crime in her fiction, thereby implicating the reader further in the sordid fantasy that is being worked out.”

—Robert Towers,
New York Review of Books

“Mesmerizing . . . not to be recommended for the weak-minded and impressionable.”

—
Washington Post Book World

“A writer who has created a world of her own—a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger . . . Patricia Highsmith is the poet of apprehension.”

—Graham Greene

“An atmosphere of nameless dread, of unspeakable foreboding, permeates every page of Patricia Highsmith, and there’s nothing quite like it.”

—
Boston Globe

“[Highsmith] has an uncanny feeling for the rhythms of terror.”

—
Times Literary Supplement

“To call Patricia Highsmith a thriller writer is true but not the whole truth: her books have stylistic texture, psychological depth, mesmeric readability.”

—
The Sunday Times
(London)

“Highsmith’s novels skew your sense of literary justice, tilt your internal scales of right and wrong. The ethical order of things in the real world seems less stable [as she] deftly warps the moral sense of her readers.”

—
Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Highsmith . . . conveys a firm, unshakable belief in the existence of evil—personal, psychological, and political. . . . The genius of Highsmith’s writing is that it is at once deeply disturbing and exhilarating.”

—
Boston Phoenix

“No one has created psychological suspense more densely and deliciously satisfying.”

—
Vogue

“Highsmith’s writing is wicked . . . it puts a spell on you, after which you feel altered, even tainted. . . . A great American writer is back to stay.”

—
Entertainment Weekly

“[Highsmith] is no more a practitioner of the murder mystery genre . . . than are Dostoevsky, Faulkner and Camus.”

—Joan Smith,
Los Angeles Times

“Highsmith’s gift as a suspense novelist is to show how this secret desire can bridge the normal and abnormal. . . . She seduces us with whisky-smooth surfaces only to lead us blindly into darker terrain.”

—
Commercial Appeal

“Though Highsmith would no doubt disclaim any kinship with Jonathan Swift or Evelyn Waugh, the best of [her work] is in the same tradition. . . . It is Highsmith’s dark and sometimes savage humor, and the intelligence that informs her precise and hard-edged prose, which puts one in mind of those authors.”

—
Newsday

First published as a Norton paperback 2004

First published in the United States of America 1964

Published in Great Britain by Heinemann 1965

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this
book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

Production manager: Amanda Morrison

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Highsmith, Patricia, 1921–

The glass cell / Patricia Highsmith.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-393-32567-6 (pbk.)

1. Ex-convicts—Fiction. 2. Judicial error—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3558.I366G58 2004

813’.54—dc22 2004004565

eISBN: 978-0-393-34568-1

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110