Description
Tom Ripley is respectable now — married, villa’d in France, a connoisseur — which makes him more dangerous than ever. Ripley Under Ground — the second novel in Patricia Highsmith’s five-volume Ripliad, published in 1970 — finds Tom running an art forgery scheme: when a suspicious American collector threatens exposure, Tom’s old talents — improvisation, deception, and murder — come smoothly back into play.
Highsmith deepens her most famous creation: Tom the aesthete, Tom the gardener, Tom the killer — all the same man, all utterly convincing. The forgery plot lets her satirize the pretensions of the art world while tightening the noose around her hero, and the climax is pure Highsmith: amoral, elegant, and unforgettable.
Second in the Ripliad — read after The Talented Mr. Ripley for the full descent. For psychological suspense fans: Tom at his most polished and most chilling — the monster as man of taste, and all the more terrifying for it.
The life and times of one of our most enchanting artists — a twentieth-century fairy tale, lovingly remembered. Between Lives: An Artist and Her World is the memoir of Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012), the American Surrealist painter, sculptor, and writer, published in 2001 by W. W. Norton.
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An expansion of her earlier reminiscences, this book revisits Tanning’s extraordinary journey: from a young woman determined to become an artist, to the center of the Surrealist world — and to her marriage to the legendary Max Ernst, a partnership tenderly rendered at the heart of these pages. Her voice is wry, wise, and utterly her own. Along the way she paints vivid portraits of the artists, poets, and dreamers who filled her world, in prose as imaginative as her canvases.
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Part memoir, part artist’s meditation on a life in art, Between Lives is essential reading for lovers of Surrealism, twentieth-century art, and beautifully told life stories — a book to savor slowly.
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