Praise for 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
Patricia Highsmith was born in Texas in 1921, raised in New York, and lived most of her adult life in Europe. A graduate of Barnard College, prior to her career as a novelist, Highsmith wrote stories for comic books and, on Truman Capote's recommendation, was a resident at Yaddo. She was the author of 22 novels and seven collections of stories. She died in 1995.