http://www.randomhouse.com/author/ www.randomhouse.com 2006-03-13T11:23:00-05:00 www.randomhouse.com

A Monster's Notes
Written by Laurie Sheck

Hardcover, 544 pages | Knopf | Fiction - Literary | $30.00 | 978-0-307-27105-1 (0-307-27105-6)

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.

]]> http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780307271051 2009-06-23T00:30:00-05:00 www.randomhouse.com

A Monster's Notes
Written by Laurie Sheck

eBook, 416 pages | Knopf | Fiction - Literary | $30.00 | 978-0-307-27238-6 (0-307-27238-9)

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.

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Captivity Poems
Written by Laurie Sheck

Trade Paperback, 96 pages | Knopf | Poetry - Single Author - American | $17.00 | 978-0-375-71144-2 (0-375-71144-9)

The “exquisite and haunting” (Booklist) collection of poems built around the language and mystique of American captivity narratives in which Sheck enters the vivid life we live inside our own minds and selves, and takes us into the mysterious underside of consciousness and selfhood.

]]> http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780375711442 2009-06-02T00:30:00-05:00 www.randomhouse.com

Captivity
Written by Laurie Sheck

Hardcover, 96 pages | Knopf | Poetry - Single Author - American | $25.00 | 978-0-307-26539-5 (0-307-26539-0)

I feel a pleasure of never contained sweep over me, now that I know place is never
Clear or wholly settled, not even the veins on the underside of a leaf, its freedoms.

At once tender and fierce, concise and associative, Laurie Sheck’s Captivity charts and explores the textures and movements of mind in her gorgeous, long-lined poetry. Placed at intervals throughout the book are poems the author calls “Removes,” which take their initial impulse from American captivity narratives and constitute a profoundly felt inquiry into what is familiar and what is strange, what it means to be displaced and radically apart, and how disruption itself becomes its own kind of opportunity. The poems describe a psychic territory both desolate and exultant, as Sheck embraces the fragmentary, yet stays alert to what remains “mysteriously standing.” She writes, “Thinking has a quiet skin. But I feel the break and fled of things inside it. ” In Captivity, Sheck illuminates this shadow-thought world that governs what we are and attains provocative glimpses of the fluid self.

]]> http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780307265395 2007-02-27T00:30:00-05:00 www.randomhouse.com

Black Series Poems
Written by Laurie Sheck

Trade Paperback, 112 pages | Knopf | Poetry - Single Author - American | $17.00 | 978-0-375-70965-4 (0-375-70965-7)

In her remarkable Black Series, Laurie Sheck turns the ordinary world inside out and shows us its glittering seams. Her long, elegantly quizzical lines convey a haunted vision of human striving which is in part an elaboration on our daily reality, and in part a fantastic departure from it. “I can almost taste the glassy air,” she writes. “Where are the birds in it, / wings lifting as currents buffet them like echoes, bright / chaos of atomized instances . . . ?” Roaming freely in the shifting landscape of the imagination, Sheck delivers an inner life that is just as vivid as what we see around us; at the same time, she shows us what we see in a new light, bringing illumination even to darkness:

It’s the black night that wakes in me,
so dominant, so focused.
And then a car goes by and I think,
“I’m in the world,”
tires kicking up gravel from the dust.
What does the orange hawkweed do
inside this dark–its radiance
secretive but not extinguished?

To read this collection is to discover at every turn that secretive but undeniable radiance, and a language that is both riveting and distinctive.


From the Hardcover edition.

]]> http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780375709654 2003-03-04T00:30:00-05:00 www.randomhouse.com

The Willow Grove
Written by Laurie Sheck

Trade Paperback | Knopf | Poetry - Single Author - American | $13.00 | 978-0-679-76603-2 (0-679-76603-0)

Laurie Sheck interweaves the contemporary with the mythic, creating a realm in which such things as radios, skyscrapers, expressways, and mannequins are at once familiar and strange; immediate, yet tinged with the light of distance and myth. It is a realm where faces on a television newscast disappear "into the undertow / of hunger for the next thing and the next," and mannequins "stand in their angelic armor."

Placed at intervals throughout these pages is a series of poems entitled "From The Book of Persephone," poems that explore the underworld through a fractured contemporary lens, depicting it as a psychological landscape of isolation and desire.

As Mona Van Duyn said of Laurie Sheck's previous book, Io at Night, "When her sensibility and the reverberating myth are in perfect conjunction, the extraordinary happens: the mythical figure enters the poet's imagination so consumingly that it is impossible to tell whose life, whose feelings fill the form on the page."


From the Hardcover edition.

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