Tom Ripley (Damon) is a calculating young man who believes it's better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody. Opportunity knocks in the form of a wealthy American shipbuilder who hires Tom to travel to Italy to bring back his playboy son, Dickie (Law). Ripley worms his way into the idyllic lives of Dickie and his girlfriend (Paltrow), plunging into a daring scheme of duplicity, lies and murder.

This adventurous volume, with its companion devoted to the 1930s and 40s, presents a rich vein of modern American writing too often neglected in mainstream literary histories. Evolving out of the terse and violent hardboiled style of the pulp magazines, noir fiction expanded over the decades into a varied and innovative body of writing. Tapping deep roots in the American literary imagination, the novels in this volume explore themes of crime, guilt,...