New York Times • Times Critics Top Books of 2021 The Times (of London) • Best Books of the Year Excerpted in The New Yorker Profiled in The Los Angeles Times Publishing for the centenary of her birth, Patricia Highsmith’s diaries “offer the most complete picture ever published” of the canonical author (New York Times). Relegated to the genre of mystery during her lifetime, Patricia Highsmith is now recognized as one of “our greatest modernist writers” (Gore Vidal). Beloved by fans who were unaware of the real psychological turmoil behind her prose, the famously secretive Highsmith refused to authorize a biography, instead sequestering herself in her Switzerland home in her final years. Posthumously, her devoted editor Anna von Planta discovered her diaries and notebooks in 1995, tucked in a closet—with tantalizing instructions to be read. For years thereafter, von Planta meticulously culled from over eight thousand pages to help reveal the inscrutable figure behind the legendary pen. Beginning with her junior year at Barnard in 1941, Highsmith ritualistically kept a diary and notebook—the former to catalog her day, the latter to brainstorm stories and hone her craft. This volume weaves diary and notebook simultaneously, exhibiting precisely how Highsmith’s personal affairs seeped into her fiction—and the sheer darkness of her own imagination. Charming yet teetering on the egotistical, young “Pat” lays bare her dizzying social life in 1940s Greenwich Village, barhopping with Judy Holliday and Jane Bowles, among others. Alongside Flannery O’Conner and Chester Himes, she attended—at the recommendation of Truman Capote—the Yaddo artist colony in 1948, where she drafted Strangers on a Train. Published in 1950 and soon adapted by Alfred Hitchcock, this debut novel brought recognition and brief financial security, but left a heartsick Highsmith agonizing: “What is the life I choose?” Providing extraordinary insights into gender and sexuality in mid-twentieth-century America, Highsmith’s diaries convey her euphoria writing The Price of Salt (1951). Yet her sophomore novel would have to be published under a pseudonym, so as not to tarnish her reputation. Indeed, no one could anticipate commercial reception for a novel depicting love between two women in the McCarthy era. Seeking relief from America, Highsmith catalogs her peripatetic years in Europe, subsisting on cigarettes and growing more bigoted and satirical with age. After a stay in Positano with a new lover, she reflects in her notebooks on being an expat, and gleefully conjures the unforgettable The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955); it would be this sociopathic antihero who would finally solidify her true fame. At once lovable, detestable, and mesmerizing, Highsmith put her turbulent life to paper for five decades, acutely aware there must be “a few usable things in literature.” A memoir as significant in our own century as Sylvia Plath’s journals and Simone de Beauvoir’s writings were to another time, Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks is an historic work that chronicles a woman’s rise against the conventional tide to unparalleled literary prominence.

Essential for understanding Patricia Highsmith’s transgressive life and prophetic work, this volume is also “one of the most observant and ecstatic accounts . . . about being young and alive in New York City” (Dwight Garner,—New York Times). Before Alfred Hitchcock adapted her debut novel, Strangers on a Train, for the big screen; before her suave and sociopathic Thomas Ripley snaked his way into the canon of psychological suspense; and before The Price of Salt became a cult classic of romantic obsession, who was Patricia Highsmith? Focused on her formative years in Manhattan, this condensed edition of Highsmith’s monumental Diaries and Notebooks reveals “Pat” at her most passionate and florescent. Beginning in 1941 at Barnard College and encompassing the Texas native’s adventurous twenties,?The New York Years intertwines scenes from her dizzying social life—rife with sleepless nights barhopping in the queer underground Greenwich Village scene, always juggling too many lovers—with an intimate self-portrait of a young artist who by day dispassionately wrote comics for a paycheck. Amid all the hangovers and the breakups, she read voraciously and honed her craft with verve. Laid bare in this perennial reader’s edition are the bold, hilarious, romantic, tragic, and maddeningly contradictory observations of one of “our greatest modernist writers” (Gore Vidal).

A look at the history of psychiatry’s foundational impact on the lives of queer and gender-variant people. In the mid-twentieth century, American psychiatrists proclaimed homosexuality a mental disorder, one that was treatable and amenable to cure. Drawing on a collection of previously unexamined case files from St. Elizabeths Hospital, In the Shadow of Diagnosis explores the encounter between psychiatry and queer and gender-variant people in the mid- to late-twentieth-century United States. It examines psychiatrists’ investments in understanding homosexuality as a dire psychiatric condition, a judgment that garnered them tremendous power and authority at a time that historians have characterized as psychiatry’s “golden age.” That stigmatizing diagnosis made a deep and lasting impact, too, on queer people, shaping gay life and politics in indelible ways. In the Shadow of Diagnosis helps us understand the adhesive and ongoing connection between queerness and sickness.

A riveting dual biography of the McLaughlins—identical twin sisters who became groundbreaking photographers in New York during the glamorous magazine golden age of the 1930s and 40s—for fans of Ninth Street Women and The Barbizon. The McLaughlin twins were trailblazing female photographers, celebrated in their time as stars in their respective fields, but have largely been forgotten since. Here, in Double Click, author Carol Kino provides us with a fascinating window into the golden era of magazine photography and the first young women’s publications, bringing these two brilliant women and their remarkable accomplishments to vivid life. Frances was the only female photographer on staff in Condé Nast's photo studio, hired just after Irving Penn, and became known for streetwise, cinema verité-style work, which appeared in the pages of Glamour and Vogue. Her sister Kathryn’s surrealistic portraits filled the era’s new “career girl” magazines, including Charm and Mademoiselle. Both twins married Harper’s Bazaar photographers and socialized with a glittering crowd that included the supermodel Lisa Fonssagrives and the photographer Richard Avedon. Kino uses their careers to illuminate the lives of young women during this time, an early twentieth-century moment marked by proto-feminist thinking, excitement about photography’s burgeoning creative potential, and the ferment of wartime New York. Toward the end of the 1940s, and moving into the early 1950s, conventionality took over, women were pushed back into the home, and the window of opportunity began to close. Kino renders this fleeting moment of possibility in gleaming multi-color, so that the reader cherishes its abundance, mourns its passing, and gains new appreciation for the talent that was fostered at its peak. Pulling back the curtain on an electric, creative time in New York’s history, and rich with original research, Double Click is cultural reportage and biography at its finest.

A collection of the year’s best mystery and suspense short fiction selected by #1 New York Times bestselling author and guest editor Jess Walter and series editor Steph Cha. New York Times bestselling author and “superb storyteller” (Boston Globe), Jess Walter flexes his genre chops and selects twenty short stories that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year.

A fascinating glimpse into the complex and often unexpected ways that women and ideas about women shaped widely read Jewish newspapers Between the 1880s and 1920s, Yiddish-language newspapers rose from obscurity to become successful institutions integral to American Jewish life. During this period, Yiddish-speaking immigrants came to view newspapers as indispensable parts of their daily lives. For many Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, acclimating to America became inextricably intertwined with becoming a devoted reader of the Yiddish periodical press, as the newspapers and their staffs became a fusion of friends, religious and political authorities, tour guides, matchmakers, and social welfare agencies. In A Revolution in Type, Ayelet Brinn argues that women were central to the emergence of the Yiddish press as a powerful, influential force in American Jewish culture. Through rhetorical debates about women readers and writers, the producers of the Yiddish press explored how to transform their newspapers to reach a large, diverse audience. The seemingly peripheral status of women’s columns and other newspaper features supposedly aimed at a female audience—but in reality, read with great interest by male and female readers alike—meant that editors and publishers often used these articles as testing grounds for the types of content their newspapers should encompass. The book explores the discovery of previously unknown work by female writers in the Yiddish press, whose contributions most often appeared without attribution; it also examines the work of men who wrote under women’s names in order to break into the press. Brinn shows that instead of framing issues of gender as marginal, we must view them as central to understanding how the American Yiddish press developed into the influential, complex, and diverse publication field it eventually became.