Most Popular Books by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

The Last Man ends in 2100, "the last year of the world." A devastating plague has wiped out humanity, except for one man. This novel of horror, originally published in 1826, was rejected in its time and out of print from 1833 to 1963, when the first Bison Books edition appeared. Some critics now rate The Last Man more highly than Frankenstein, by the same author. This Bison Books edition offers aønew introduction by Anne K. Mellor, who writes, "In our era of AIDS and biological warfare, Shelley''s apocalyptic vision of an incurable plague that gradually destroys the entire human species resonates with mythic power."

A monster assembled by a scientist from parts of dead bodies develops a mind of his own as he learns to loathe himself and hate his creator.

Frankenstein was published in 1818, the work of a 21-year-old genius named Mary Shelley. Hundreds of movies, adaptations, and monster masks later, its reputation remains so lively that the title has become its own word in the English language. Victor Frankenstein, a scientist, discovers the secret of reanimating the dead. After he rejects his hideous creation, not even the farthest poles of the earth will keep his bitter monster from seeking an inhuman revenge. Inspired by a uniquely Romantic view of science’s possibilities, Shelley’s masterpiece ultimately wrestles with the hidden shadows of the human mind.

"James Rieger''s Frankenstein is relatively special among editions: it is the definitive scholarly text, and it is also the most readable copy for the classroom and the general reader. . . .The Rieger Frankenstein is very simply the best edition of this tremendously important and popular novel."--William Veeder, University of Chicago

The definitive, annotated edition of Mary Shelley''s classic novel.

A collection of Mary Shelley''s life work of short stories and tales, that has not received as much attention as her most widely read work "Frankenstein."

200 years after it was first published, Mary Shelley''s Frankenstein has stood the test of time as a gothic masterpiece--a classic work of humanity and horror that blurs the line between man and monster... The story of Victor Frankenstein and the monstrous creature he created has held readers spellbound ever since it was published two centuries ago. On the surface, it is a novel of tense and steadily mounting horror; but on a more profound level, it offers searching illumination of the human condition in its portrayal of a scientist who oversteps the bounds of conscience, and of a monster brought to life in an alien world, ever more desperately attempting to escape the torture of his solitude. A novel of hallucinatory intensity, Frankenstein represents one of the most striking flowerings of the Romantic imagination. Original Complete Unabridged Illustrated with book-end doodles about reading

The letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley reveal a remarkable woman living in a remarkable age. They date from October 1814 - shortly after her elopement with Percy Bysshe Shelley - through September 1850, five months before her death. Her correspondents'' names are familiar - Shelley himself, Byron, Bulwer-Lytton, Disraeli, General Lafayette, Sir Walter Scott - and the letters abound with anecdotes about such eminent figures as her parents (William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft), Keats, Washington Irving, and Charles and Mary Lamb. Publication of the widely acclaimed three-volume edition of Mary Shelley''s letters was completed in 1988, containing all 1,276 of her known extant letters. Now Betty T. Bennett has selected 230 of those letters to give an overview of Mary Shelley''s life as she was seeing it, living it, and recording it. Bennett also includes an introductory essay that sketches a portrait of Mary Shelley, her world, and her place in the history of literature and letters.

Few creatures of horror have seized readers'' imaginations and held them for so long as the anguished monster of Mary Shelley''s Frankenstein. The story of Victor Frankenstein''s terrible creation and the havoc it caused has enthralled generations of readers and inspired countless writers of horror and suspense. Considering the novel''s enduring success, it is remarkable that it began merely as a whim of Lord Byron''s."We will each write a story," Byron announced to his next-door neighbors, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her lover Percy Bysshe Shelley. The friends were summering on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland in 1816, Shelley still unknown as a poet and Byron writing the third canto of Childe Harold. When continued rains kept them confined indoors, all agreed to Byron''s proposal.The illustrious poets failed to complete their ghost stories, but Mary Shelley rose supremely to the challenge. With Frankenstein, she succeeded admirably in the task she set for herself: to create a story that, in her own words, "would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror - one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart."