Joan Schenkar – författare

Born a scant three months after her uncle Oscar's notorious arrest, raised in the shadow of the greatest scandal of the turn of the twentieth century, Dolly Wilde attracted people of taste and talent wherever she went. Brilliantly witty, charged with charm, a "born writer," she drenched her prodigious talents in liquids, burnt up her opportunities in flamboyant affairs, and died as she lived,repeating her uncle's history of excess, collapse, and ruin. In this biography, Joan Schenkar has created both a captivating portrait of Dolly and a cultural history of Natalie Clifford Barney's remarkable Parisian salon,frequented by Janet Flanner, Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes,in which she shone so brightly.

Patricia Highsmith, one of the greatest writers of 20th Century American fiction, had a life as darkly compelling as that of her favourite "hero-criminal," the talented Tom Ripley. Joan Schenkar maps out this richly bizarre life from her birth in Texas to Hitchcock's filming of her first novel, "Strangers On a Train", to her long, strange, self-exile in Europe. We see her as a secret writer for the comics, a brilliant creator of disturbing fictions, and an erotic predator with dozens of women (and a few good men) on her love list. "The Talented Miss Highsmith" is the first literary biography with access to Highsmith's whole story: her closest friends, her oeuvre, her archives. It's a compulsive page-turner unlike any other, a book worthy of Highsmith herself.