Small G: A Summer Idyll

by Patricia Highsmith

  “Small g is a welcome addition to Highsmith’s published novels, offering readers an insight into a fascinating aspect of Swiss society and an opportunity to explore Highsmith’s final concerns and obsessions.”

  —Louise Welsh, author of The Cutting Room,

  in the Washington Post Book World

  “For eliciting the menace that lurks in familiar surroundings, there’s no one like Patricia Highsmith.”

  —Time

  “[Highsmith] has an uncanny feeling for the rhythms of terror.”

  —Times Literary Supplement (London)

  “An atmosphere of nameless dread, of unspeakable foreboding, permeates every page of Patricia Highsmith, and there’s nothing quite like it.”

  —Boston Globe

  “Patricia Highsmith’s novels are peerlessly disturbing . . . bad dreams that keep us thrashing for the rest of the night.”

  —The New Yorker

  “Patricia Highsmith is often called a mystery or crime writer, which is a bit like calling Picasso a draftsman.”

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “One of our greatest modernist writers.”

  —Gore Vidal

  “[Highsmith is] a writer who has created a world of her own—a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger. . . . Patricia Highsmith is the poet of apprehension.”

  —Graham Greene, from his foreword to

  The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith

  “As in many of her other works, Ms. Highsmith here seems to relish the abnormal.”

  —Judy Alter, Dallas Morning News

  “A powerful and mesmerizing read; highly recommended for public and academic libraries.”

  —Lisa Nussbaum, Library Journal

  “Highsmith’s last book . . . offer[s] an intriguing exploration of gay culture and the complexities of love, jealousy, possessiveness and friendship.”

  —Misha Stone, Booklist

  “The best thing about Small g is the affectionate homage it pays to relationships that are not exclusive or possessive, that may or may not be sexual, but which have the power to create happiness or break a stranglehold that is choking off a full, delicious life.”

  —Lambda Book Report

  “All those qualities that have made Highsmith such an important figure—her carefully crafted prose, her understanding of human frailties and the randomness of life—are present in this final work.”

  —Aaron Stander, I Love a Mystery

  Copyright © 1995 by Patricia Highsmith and Diogenes Verlag AG, Zurich

  First American edition 2004

  First published in Great Britain by Bloomsbury 1995

  All rights reserved

  First printed as a Norton paperback 2005

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from

  this book,write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,

  500 Fifth Avenue, NewYork, NY 10110

  Production manager: Amanda Morrison

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Highsmith, Patricia, 1921–

  Small g : a summer idyll / by Patricia Highsmith.—1st American ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-393-05923-5

  1. Triangles (Interpersonal relations)—Fiction. 2. Bars (Drinking

  establishments)—Fiction. 3. Gay men—Crimes against—Fiction.

  4. Zurich (Switzerland)—Fiction. 5. Sexual orientation—Fiction.

  6. Conspiracies—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3558.I366S63 2004

  813’.54—dc22 2004044837

  ISBN 0-393-32703-5 pbk.

  eISBN: 978-0-393-34562-9

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

  www.wwnorton.com

  W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

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