In the best Patricia Highsmith short stories, jet-setters and blue-collar grinds trod the same miserable earth, dripping spite and maneuvering their false faces around each other in a gavotte of latent violence. Highsmith's best-known novels, Strangers On A Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley, established her command of discomforting situations derived from shrewdly plotted thriller narratives. Her shorter pieces tend to be more direct and less lethal, slaps in the face taking the place of slow-acting poisons. The 64 sketches in The Selected Stories Of Patricia Highsmith have been culled from five collections published in the '70s and '80s. Many of the stories have a clipped, underambitious design—Highsmith generally introduces an array of irascible characters, then creates the circumstances that kill one or more of them—but just as many find a cruel poetry in repetition. The selections drawn from The Animal Lover's Book Of Beastly Murder and Little Tales Of Misogyny may exhaust some readers with their uniform plots of, respectively, pets killing their masters and nasty feminine stereotypes driving their acquaintances to an early grave. Still, the stories would seem even more redundant if they were scattered across collections with diverse themes. In a concentrated package, even the weakest story has a purpose, though this larger anthology would have been improved by some heavy pruning. Especially effective are Misogyny's concise vignettes, which largely eschew detailed plots in favor of keen observations of aggravation or pithy dispatches like, "It was a two-pound tin of baked beans that did for Pamela, catching her smack in her right temple." The longer pieces from Slowly, Slowly In The Wind, The Black House, and Mermaids On The Golf Course expand on the qualities of Highsmith's vignettes, making the irritations pettier and the knee-jerk behavior more awful. But the reasons to read come from the small, perfect passages of prose, and the sublime artfulness of Highsmith's sentences. What could be better than, "An art student was flung through a wall, his brush poised, ready to make the master stroke as he floated horizontally towards a true oblivion"?