A Monster's Notes

By Laurie Sheck

Book Overview

"A remarkable creation, a baroque opera of grief, laced with lines of haunting beauty and profundity." --The Washington Post

Now in paperback, the bold, genre-defying book that asked: What if Mary Shelley had not invented Frankenstein's monster at all but had met him when she was a girl of eight, sitting by her mother's grave, and he came to her unbidden?

In a riveting mix of fact and poetic license, Laurie Sheck gives us the "monster" in his own words: recalling how he was "made" and how Victor Frankenstein abandoned him; pondering the tragic tale of the Shelleys and the intertwining of his life with Mary's (whose fictionalized letters salt the narrative, along with those of her nineteenth-century intimates); taking notes on all aspects of human striving--from Gertrude Stein to robotics to the Northern explorers whose lonely quest mirrors his own--as he tries to understand the strange race that made yet shuns him, and to find his own freedom of mind.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375711821
• ISBN13: 9780375711824
• Release Date: January 2012
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Length: 544 Pages
• Weight: 1.72 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.1" x 9.2"