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Today, Patricia Highsmith is hot. Once belittled as a "dime-store Dostoyevsky," she is now being canonized as a major American artist. Nearly a decade after her death, in 1995, her popularity in the United States is at an all-time high. A collection, The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith, was published by W.W. Norton in 2001, and Nothing That Meets the Eye: The Uncollected Stories of Patricia Highsmith followed in 2002. Norton also has been steadily reissuing Highsmith's previous books in handsome new trade editions. In a different venue, Matt Damon and John Malkovich have taken their turns playing Highsmith's murderous antihero Tom Ripley in recent movies.
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Wonderful hand-drawn maps
Last month, I asked Slate readers to send me their hand-drawn maps . The request was part of my series on signs , the tools that professionals use to orient us and direct us from point A to point B. But official signs aren't the only things that help us get around. Since early man first drew on his cave wall—including marks that some scholars argue were maps of local rivers and settlements—we've been sketching out routes to guide one another to the market and to the mountain top. These humble maps can be beautiful. They can also be messy, indecipherable, inaccurate, and unattractive. Slate readers sent in nearly 200 maps, and they ranged from hasty scribbles on scrap paper to elaborate, multicolored renderings. No matter what it looks like, a handmade map offers several advantages over a road atlas or the directions you get from Google. Read on to see some of your most interesting hand-drawn maps—and to discover why homemade maps are often superior to the ones d...

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