The fall semester begins today. My courses are still all online. I have changed the Crime Fiction course to be all Highsmith, because obviously being busy already means nothing. I’m resisting overloading them with biographical information at the start, instead planning to parcel it out as they make their own discoveries, though I gave them a link to the brief overview at the Women Crime Writers site, as well as another career overview.

They are assigned two short stories: ‘The Heroine’ which is in the collection Under A Dark Angel’s Eye (and other places), and ‘Eel in the Bathtub’ which she published as a student at Barnard and I find really interesting for what it anticipates later in her career. If you want to follow along, you can read these stories; next week we are beginning Strangers on a Train. After much hemming and hawing, I’ve not assigned any of the film versions, so they are free to choose to write about adaptation in their final projects. They also have the choice to write about one of the novels we won’t be reading.

I mentioned my anticipation for the release of the diaries, which looks to be November (at least in the US). Bound to be fascinating