« My wish for the new year:
All the devils, the lusts, the passions, the greed, the jealousies,
the loves, the hatreds, the strange desires, the enemies, imaginary or real,
the army of my memories, all that I struggle with –
may they never leave me in peace ». –P. HAISMITH

« Essential to understanding the life and work of Patricia Highsmith outside social conventions, this book is also one of the most detailed and ecstatic descriptions of how a young, energetic, homosexual woman lived in New York ». –DWIGHT GARNER, New York Times

BEFORE ALFRED HITCHCOCK ADAPTED for the big screen her first novel Strangers on a Train; before the seductive sociopath Tom Ripley secured a permanent place in the psychological thriller canon; and before The Price of Salt (Carol) became the classic cult book about erotic obsession, what did we know about Patricia Highsmith?

Focusing on her formative years in Manhattan, this anthology from her voluminous diaries and notebooks reveals "Pat" in her youth, when she was bursting with passion and brilliance.
Starting in 1941, when she was a twenty-year-old student at Barnard College, through her adventurous third decade, The New York Years weaves scenes from her dizzying social life – full of sleepless nights in the bars of the queer underground Village scene, filled with loves and flirtations – with the self-portrait of a young artist who worked by day writing comics.

Between hangovers and breakups, she voraciously read literature and worked on her art with intensity. She literally absorbs Shakespeare, Rilke, T. S. Eliot, Joyce, Kafka, Hölderlin, Freud, the Russians, Virginia Woolf, and countless others.

In this timeless edition, the bold, hilarious, romantic, tragic, and outrageously contradictory observations of one of "our greatest modernist writers" (Gore Vidal) are revealed.

« Patricia Highsmith’s Diaries and Notebooks will prove to be one of the greatest artistic self-portraits of the 20th century ». –FRANCES WILSON, New York Review of Books

« This book gives us impressive access to the mind of a notoriously secretive writer ». – KEZIAH WEIR, Vanity Fair