Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus (The Pennyroyal Editio...

The California edition of the Pennyroyal Press Frankenstein unites the dark side of Barry Moser's art with the classic 1818 text of Mary Shelley's tale of moral transfiguration. In a vivid sequence of woodcuts, the reader witnesses the birth of the "monster" as Moser shapes him from darkness and gives him a form simultaneously ghastly in its malice and transfixing in its suffering.

Amazon.com Review

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.

From the Back Cover

The California edition of the Pennyroyal Press Frankenstein unites the dark side of Barry Moser's art with the classic 1818 text of Mary Shelley's take of moral transfiguration. In a vivid sequence of woodcuts, the reader witnesses the birth of the 'monster' as Moser shapes him from darkness and gives him a form simultaneously ghastly in its malice and transfixing in its suffering.

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