On January 1, 1818, Mary Shelly anonymously published the first edition of Frankenstein. Because her husband, the renowned Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, helped her edit the original manuscript and wrote a preface to the first edition, most critics, reviewers, and readers assumed he had written this Gothic tale that was, arguably, the first science … Read more
Each generation gets a cinematic Frankenstein made in its own image. Now, as I, Frankenstein is released, we have ours. On a wet night, I stood in line and bought a ticket, almost 200 years after Mary Shelley had created her work of fiction, one that has re-incarnated in the cinematic age to become a … Read more
The womb and the tomb—one of the most striking mirror images that our lives have to offer. Babies are buried alive in their warm mothers’girth. Bodies are dead and buried in their cold mother earth. For one, there is the darkness of genesis and growth, for the other, the darkness of death and decay. The … Read more
The LA Times’ Jacket Copy blog — tagline “Books, Authors and All Things Bookish” — recently alerted me to one of the most enjoyable “quickie time-waster websites” I’ve found in quite some time: I Write Like. Based on “a Bayesian classifier” — the programming backbone for a number of ordinary, run-of-the-mill spam filters — the website is disarmingly … Read more