Frankenstein (Penguin Student Editions)

Pse packs are principally for use by students in the last year(s) of secondary school and tertiary level colleges and universities. The texts chosen are the most frequently studied by students of English. Each book includes the complete text along with an introduction, a chronology of the author's life and times, textual glossing, a textual summary, character notes, suggested study activities and topics for discussion, and - where relevant - critical views. The pack includes a CD with 70 minutes of unabridged extracts from the text. The extracts are flagged on the relevant pages of the student edition.

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.