A Game for the Living

"Patricia Highsmith is often described as a mystery or crime writer, which is a bit like calling Picasso a draftsman. The statement contains a measure of truth, but what it leaves out is almost everything. . . . [A Game for the Living is] an elegant and psychologically sophisticated morality play. . . . All of it reveals Highsmith to be in fine form."–Cleveland Plain Dealer

"Classic."–USA Today

"There's no thriller writer's gamesmanship in her novels, none of the reassuring trickery of professional pulp; Highsmith's style is as blunt and straightforward as a strip-search."–New Yorker

"A coolly analytic study of friendship, neurosis, and grief."–Mystery News

Praise for Patricia Highsmith

[Highsmith's] characters are irrational, and they leap to life in their very lack of reason. . . . Highsmith is the poet of apprehension rather than fear.–Graham Greene

For some obscure reason, one of our greatest modernist writers, Patricia Highsmith, has been thought of in her own land as a writer of thrillers. She is both. She is certainly one of the most interesting writers of this dismal century.–Gore Vidal

Miss Highsmith's genius is in presenting fantasy's paradox: successes are not what they seem. . . . Where in the traditional fairy tale the heroine turns the toad into a prince, in Miss Highsmith's fables the prince becomes a toad–success is nearly always fatal. . . . Combining the best features of the suspense genre with the best of existential fiction–a reflection–the stories are fabulous, in all the senses of that word.–Paul Theroux

Patricia Highsmith's novels are peerlessly disturbing–bad dreams that keep us restless and thrashing for the rest of the night.–Terrence Rafferty, New Yorker

Highsmith, who can change reality to nightmare with one well-turned phrase, is a legendary crime writer.–Cleveland Plain Dealer