Printed below are quotes from the prepublication reviews of THE TALENTED MISS HIGHSMITH. ( A click on the title on the right side of this page will take you to the first chapter.)
"Author and playwright Schenkar presents a compelling portrait of suspense novelist Patricia Highsmith whose own life was often as twisted as that of her antihero Tom Ripley..... 'Perversion,' Highsmith once said, 'interests me most and is my guiding darkness,' and Schenkar illuminates how her demons played out on the page and in real life."
-Publishers Weekly Pick of the Week
"Schenkar’s fascinating biography portrays Highsmith as driven by obsessions, especially her love-hate relationship with her mother, and a yin-yang ambivalence that became a central main theme in her writings .. The catalyst for Schenkar’s exhaustive, compelling work, which boasts copious end notes, maps, charts, diagrams, bibliography, and chronology, was the recent unearthing of 8,000 pages of Highsmith’s secret journals. The result is an essential, scholarly, lesbian, and literary biography."
--Booklist
"A comprehensive, nuanced evaluation of Highsmith Country."
-Kirkus Reviews
In novels like STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY, and THE PRICE OF SALT, Pat Highsmith, murder on her mind, turned the American Dream upside down. Her slow, literary crawl over the surface of things produced one iconic character, the talented Mr. Ripley, and hundreds of raspingly acute portraits of quietly violating acts. The toxic brilliance of their trail goes on glowing long after their author -- as cruel to her characters as Henry James was to his -- has dispatched her perpetrators to their nasty, fictional ends.
Highsmith's life was every bit as transgressive and fascinating as her writing and it encompassed many obsessions. THE TALENTED MISS HIGHSMITH -- as radical as its subject -- uses heretofore unavailable materials, techniques, and testimonies to chronicle the secret life and serious work of the outsider artist whose major contribution to American literature was Highsmith Country.
JOAN SCHENKAR has been called "America's most original female contemporary playwright." TRULY WILDE, her biography of Oscar's interesting niece Dolly Wilde, has been acclaimed as "a revelation, the great story of a life and of the creation of modern culture."
As a child actor in Seattle, Schenkar made many television and stage appearances (one of them was with Everett Edward Horton) and was a touring member of the corps de ballet of The Cornish Ballet Company. She wrote her first play while living in The Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan.
The recipient of more than forty grants, fellowships, and awards for her "comedies of menace" (including seven National Endowment for the Arts grants), Schenkar has been reviewed in every major (and many minor) newspaper in the English-speaking theatre world. She has been playwright-in-residence in universities, artists' colonies, as well as in such experimental theatre companies as Joseph Chaikin’s Winter Project, The Polish Laboratory Theatre, and The Minnesota Opera New Music Theatre Ensemble. She is an alumna of New Dramatists, and a current member of The Authors Guild, Societe des auteurs et compositeurs dramatiques, PEN, The Dramatists’ Guild, and The Brontë Society. She was founder and artistic director of Force Majeure Productions in New York City and the London theatre company, SIGNS OF LIFE THEATRE, was named after her play.
Her published plays include one of the most widely-produced and studied plays in the history of theatre written by women, SIGNS OF LIFE. She has had more than five hundred productions of her work on stage, radio, and video, including the following plays: CABIN FEVER, SIGNS OF LIFE, THE LODGER, BUCKS AND DOES, MR. MONSTER, THE LAST OF HITLER, BETWEEN THE ACTS, HUNTING DOWN THE SEXES, FULFILLING KOCH’S POSTULATE, FAMILY PRIDE IN THE 50’s, FIRE IN THE FUTURE, THE UNIVERSAL WOLF, BURNING DESIRES.
Feature articles about JOAN SCHENKAR’s work have appeared in such publications as The Village Voice, The Washington Post, The Denver Post, The New York Times, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, The Los Angeles Times. She is the subject of articles and interviews in such scholarly and theatrical journals as: TDR, Theatre Journal, PAJ, Modern Drama, Women and Performance, Michigan Quarterly Review,Studies in American Drama, Alternatives Theatrales, and Feminist Re-visions. Her short stories have been published in several anthologies.
SIGNS OF LIFE: Six Comedies of Menace, a collection of her plays, was published in 1998 and was a Wesleyan University Press best-seller. TRULY WILDE: the unsettling story of Dolly Wilde, Oscar’s unusual niece was published by Basic Books/Perseus in New York, Virago Press/Little Brown in London and RandomHouse/ Mondadori in Barcelona in 2000 and 2001 and was a finalist for The Lamda Literary Award. Her latest work –- a literary biography of Patricia Highsmith, THE TALENTED MISS HIGHSMITH: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith -- will be published by St Martin's Press (New York), Diogenes Verlag (Zurich), and Circe Press (Barcelona) in the Fall of 2009 and in 2010.
JOAN SCHENKAR lives and writes in Paris and Greenwich Village.
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