What if Mary Shelley had not invented Frankenstein's monster but had met him when she was a girl of eight, sitting by her mother's grave, and he came to her unbidden? What if their secret bond left her forever changed, obsessed with the strange being whom she had discovered at a time of need? What if he were still alive in the twenty-first century?

This bold, genre-defying book brings us the "monster" in his own words. He recalls how he was "made" and how Victor Frankenstein abandoned him. He ponders the tragic tale of the Shelleys and the intertwining of his life with that of Mary (whose fictionalized letters salt the narrative, along with those of her nineteenth-century intimates) in this riveting mix of fact and poetic license. He takes notes on all aspects of human striving--from the music of John Cage 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.

In the course of the monster's musings, we also see Mary Shelley's life from her childhood through her elopement with Percy Bysshe Shelley, her writing of Frankenstein, the births and deaths of her children, Shelley's famous drowning, her widowhood, her subsequent travels and life's work, and finally her death from a brain tumor at age fifty-four. The monster's fierce bond with Mary and the tale of how he ended up in her fiction is a haunted, intense love story, a story of two beings who can never forget each other.

A Monster's Notes is Sheck's most thrilling work to date, a luminous meditation on creativity and technology, on alienation and otherness, on ugliness and beauty, and on our need to be understood.

From the Hardcover edition.

A LETTER June 30, 2007

Dear Mr. Emilson,

This is to inform you that the final closing on your building on East 6th Street was successfully completed at 10:15 this morning. I have deposited the check as you instructed. The new owners will begin renovations tomorrow. In our previous communications, I asserted that the structure, now in great disrepair, was completely abandoned. However, yesterday afternoon as I made my last walk-through, I found on the second floor a short note, a manuscript wrapped in a rubber band, and an old computer. As these technically belong to you, please let me know if you want them forwarded to your London address. I have not unbound the manuscript, but reproduce for you here the short note left on top:

So much blurs ...I write then forget what I write...walk these streets, a stranger to myself and others...Then sometimes it all suddenly flares back-my breath catches, my brain aches. How long have I wandered, talking in my thoughts to the one who made me from dead, discarded things, then left me? Why did he need to see me as frightful, misbegotten? I know he'll never hear, never answer.

Walking, I remember the other ones as well, those three I watched though none of them could see me. Isn't seeing a wounding and caressing both? All of them gone now, though once I held them with my secret eyes and in my own way loved them. Mary, Claire, Clerval... All those hours they visited me in air, came to me as voices made of flesh, ripe with shades of meaning, though in the end all that's left of them is absence.

Why did she need to portray me as she did? For so long I tried not to think of our days in the graveyard, the clicking of pebbles in her hands as she sat near the bushes, listening while I read. Even now the details grow faint...I try to forget...banish it all from my mind...though part of me wants only to remember. She was a child of nine sitting by her mother's grave. I sat behind the bushes with my books. Once we briefly spoke. Mostly I read to her, that's all. And her step-sister Claire, how strange that she came to me years later, long after I'd been wandering, heading North, far off in the Arctic by then. Why did she need to come to me, or was it I who needed her? And Clerval, that gentle man who everyone thought dead-in fact he traveled east as he'd wanted. Even now I sometimes picture his hand moving in gentle transcription as day after day he translated the Dream of The Red Chamber in his house at the foot of Xiangshan Hill, and wrote letters to his friend in Aosta.

Isn't any voice largely mute and partial, even those that speak openly and plainly (though of course I mostly hide). Why do I leave this? These words absorbed into the garbage dumps, the flames-





NOTES

NOTES ON THE EARTH SEEN FROM SPACE

Over and over the word fragile."It looked so fragile, so delicate, that if you touched it with a finger it would crumble and fall apart." This from James Irwin, crew member of Apollo 15.

Astronaut Loren Acton spoke of seeing it "contained in the thin, moving, incredibly fragile shell of the biosphere."

To Aleksei Leonov, the first man to walk in space, the earth looked "touchingly alone." And when Vitali Sevastyanov was asked by ground control what he saw, he replied, "Half a world to the left, half a world to the right, I can see it all. The Earth is so small."

Neil Armstrong said, "I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and...

Laurie Sheck is the author of five books of poetry, including Captivity and The Willow Grove, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is a recent Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard and at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and her work has appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Boston Review. She teaches in the MFA Program at The New School and lives in New York City.

From the Hardcover...