Frankenstein (A Penguin Classics Hardcover)

Description

A stunning new clothbound edition of Mary Shelley s infamous work of horror fiction, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. These delectable and collectible Penguin editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design Obsessed by creating life itself, Victor Frankenstein plunders graveyards for the material to fashion a new being, which he shocks into life by electricity. But his botched creature, rejected by Frankenstein and denied human companionship, sets out to destroy his maker and all that he holds dear. This chilling gothic tale, begun when Mary Shelley was just nineteen years old, would become the world s most famous work of horror fiction, and remains a devastating exploration of the limits of human creativity. This edition also includes A Fragment by Lord Byron and The Vampyre: A Tale by John Polidori, as well as an introduction and notes Mary Shelley (1797-1851), the daughter of pioneering thinkers Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, eloped with the poet Percy Shelley at the age of sixteen. Three years later, during a wet summer on Lake Geneva, Shelley famously wrote her masterpiece, Frankenstein. The years of her marriage were blighted by the deaths of three of her four children, and further tragedy followed in 1822, when Percy Shelley drowned in Italy. Following his death, Mary Shelley returned to England and continued to travel and write until her own death at the age of fifty-three.Frankenstein, loved by many decades of readers and praised by such eminent literary critics as Harold Bloom, seems hardly to need a recommendation. If you haven t read it recently, though, you may not remember the sweeping force of the prose, the grotesque, surreal imagery, and the multilayered doppelgänger themes of Mary Shelley s masterpiece. As fantasy writer Jane Yolen writes of this (the reviewer s favorite) edition, "The strong black and whites of the main text [illustrations] are dark and brooding, with unremitting shadows and stark contrasts. But the central conversation with the monster--who owes nothing to the overused movie image … but is rather the novel s charnel-house composite--is where [Barry] Moser s illustrations show their greatest power ... The viewer can all but smell the powerful stench of the monster s breath as its words spill out across the page. Strong book-making for one of the world s strongest and most remarkable books." Includes an illuminating afterword by Joyce Carol Oates.