Frankenstein

Filmmaker and longtime horror literature fan Guillermo del Toro serves as the curator for the Penguin Horror series, a new collection of classic tales and poems by masters of the genre. Included here are some of del Toros favorites, from Mary Shelleys Frankenstein and Ray Russells short story “Sardonicus,” considered by Stephen King to be “perhaps the finest example of the modern Gothic ever written,” to Shirley Jacksons The Haunting of Hill House and stories by Ray Bradbury, Joyce Carol Oates, Ted Klein, and Robert E. Howard. Featuring original cover art by Penguin Art Director Paul Buckley, these stunningly creepy deluxe hardcovers will be perfect additions to the shelves of horror, sci-fi, fantasy, and paranormal aficionados everywhere.

Frankenstein

The epic battle between man and monster reaches its greatest pitch in the famous story of Frankenstein. In trying to create life, the young student Victor Frankenstein unleashes forces beyond his control, setting into motion a long and tragic chain of events that brings Victor himself to the very brink. How he tries to destroy his creation, as it destroys everything Victor loves, is a powerful story of love, friendship . . . and horror.

“The new Penguin Horror editions, selected by Guillermo del Toro, feature some of the best art-direction (by Paul Buckley) I've seen in a cover in quite some time.” - Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing

"Each cover does a pretty spectacular job of evoking the mood of the title in bold, screenprint-style iconography." - Dan Solomon, Fast Company

Filmmaker and longtime horror literature fan Guillermo del Toro serves as the curator for the Penguin Horror series, a new collection of classic tales and poems by masters of the genre. Included here are some of del Toro's favorites, from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Ray Russell's short story "Sardonicus," considered by Stephen King to be "perhaps the finest example of the modern Gothic ever written," to Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House and stories by Ray Bradbury, Joyce Carol Oates, Ted Klein, and Robert E. Howard. Featuring original cover art by Penguin Art Director Paul Buckley, these stunningly creepy deluxe hardcovers will be perfect additions to the shelves of horror, sci-fi, fantasy, and paranormal aficionados everywhere.

Frankenstein

The epic battle between man and monster reaches its greatest pitch in the famous story of Frankenstein. In trying to create life, the young student Victor Frankenstein unleashes forces beyond his control, setting into motion a long and tragic chain of events that brings Victor himself to the very brink. How he tries to destroy his creation, as it destroys everything Victor loves, is a powerful story of love, friendship . . . and horror.

"Of living creators of cosmic fear raised to its most artistic pitch, few if any can hope to equal the versatile Arthur Machen." -H.P. Lovecraft

Actor, journalist , devotee of Celtic Christianity and the Holy Grail legend, Welshman Arthur Machen is considered one of the fathers of weird fiction, a master of mayhem whose work has drawn comparisons to H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe. Readers will find the perfect introduction to his style in this new collection. With the title story, an exercise in the bizarre that leaves the reader disoriented virtually from the first page, Machen turns even fundamental truths upside down. "There have been those who have sounded the very depths of sin," explains the character Ambrose, "who all their lives have never done an 'ill deed.'"

Now a Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition with an introduction by Elizabeth Kostova and cover art by Ghost World creator Daniel Clowes, Mary Shelley's timeless gothic novel presents the epic battle between man and monster at its greatest literary pitch. In trying to create life, the young student Victor Frankenstein unleashes forces beyond his control, setting into motion a long and tragic chain of events that brings Victor to the very brink of madness. How he tries to destroy his creation, as it destroys everything Victor loves, is a powerful story of love, friendship, scientific hubris, and horror.

@NotoriousDOC Just did a bit-torrent-style grave robbery. My new ‘man’ will be an artful collage. Also, good conversation starter.

It’s alive! I’d better beat it over the head repeatedly with a fire extinguisher.

So sometimes you build something, and it gets away. They’re gonna can me at the university if they find out about this.

From Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books in Twenty Tweets or Less

First published in 1959, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House has been hailed as a perfect work of unnerving terror. It is the story of four seekers who arrive at a notoriously unfriendly pile called Hill House: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of a "haunting"; Theodora, his lighthearted assistant; Eleanor, a friendless, fragile young woman well acquainted with poltergeists; and Luke, the future heir of Hill House. At first, their stay seems destined to be merely a spooky encounter with inexplicable phenomena. But Hill House is gathering its powers-and soon it will choose one of them to make its own.

As Stephen King will attest , the popularity of the occult in American literature has only grown since the days of Edgar Allan Poe. American Supernatural Tales celebrates the richness of this tradition with chilling contributions from some of the nation's brightest literary lights, including Poe himself, H. P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, Ray Bradbury, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and-of course- Stephen King. By turns phantasmagoric, spectral, and demonic, this is a frighteningly good addition to Penguin Classics.

A fully revised collection of Poe's work

The first new edition of this landmark anthology since 1945 presents a more complicated, perverse, and culturally engaged Poe. Along with the author's familiar masterworks in poetry and fiction, this new Portable Poe includes satirical tales that reflect his critique of American culture.

"I think it is beyond doubt that H. P. Lovecraft has yet to be surpassed as the twentieth century's greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale." -Stephen King

Frequently imitated and widely influential, Howard Philips Lovecraft reinvented the horror genre in the 1920s, discarding ghosts and witches and instead envisioning mankind as a tiny outpost of dwindling sanity in a chaotic and malevolent universe. S. T. Joshi, Lovecraft's preeminent interpreter, presents a selection of the master's fiction, from the early tales of nightmares and madness such as "The Outsider" to the overpowering cosmic terror of "The Call of Cthulhu." More than just a collection of terrifying tales, this volume reveals the development of Lovecraft's mesmerizing narrative style and establishes him as a canonical- and visionary-American writer.

For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories presents the definitive corrected texts of these works, along with Lovecraft critic and biographer S. T. Joshi's illuminating introduction and notes to each story.

The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories presents the definitive corrected texts of these works, along with Lovecraft critic and biographer S. T. Joshi's illuminating introduction and notes to each story.

H. P. Lovecraft was born in 1890 in Providence, Rhode Island, where he lived most of his life. Frequent illnesses in his youth disrupted his schooling, but Lovecraft gained a wide knowledge of many subjects through independent reading and study. He wrote many essays and poems early in his career, but gradually focused on the writing of horror stories, after the advent in 1923 of the pulp magazine Weird Tales, to which he contributed most of his fiction. His relatively small corpus of fiction—three short novels and about sixty short stories—has nevertheless exercised a wide influence on subsequent work in the field, and he is regarded as the leading twentieth-century American author of supernatural fiction. H. P. Lovecraft died in Providence in 1937.

S. T. Joshi is a freelance writer and editor. He has edited Penguin Classics editions of H. P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories (1999), and The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories (2001), as well as Algernon Blackwood’s Ancient Sorceries and Other Strange Stories (2002). Among his critical and biographical studies are The Weird Tale (1990), Lord Dunsany: Master of the Anglo-Irish Imagination (1995), H. P. Lovecraft: A Life (1996), and The Modern Weird Tale (2001). He has also edited works by Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Machen, and H. L. Mencken, and is compiling a three-volume Encyclopedia of Supernatural Literature. He lives with his wife in Seattle, Washington.

Chronology

A Note on Texts

Tales

Predicaments

MS. Found in a Bottle (1832)

A Descent into the Maelstrom (1841)

The Masque of the Red Death (1842)

The Pit and the Pendulum (1842)

The Premature Burial (1844)

The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar (1845)

Bereavements

The Assignation (1834)

Berenice (1835)

Morella (1835)

Ligeia (1838)

The Fall of the House of Usher (1839)

Eleonora (1841)

The Oval Portrait (1842)

Antagonisms

Metzengerstein (1832)

William Wilson (1839)

The Tell-Tale Heart (1843)

The Black Cat (1843)

The Imp of the Perverse (1845)

The Cask of Amontillado (1846)

Hop-Frog (1849)

Mysteries

The Man of the Crowd (1840)

The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841)

The Gold-Bug (1843)

The Oblong Box (1844)

A Tale of the Ragged Mountains (1844)

The Purloined Letter (1844)

Grotesqueries

The Man That Was Used Up (1839)

The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether (1845)

Some Words with a Mummy (1845)

Poems

The Lake—To—(1827)

Sonnet—To Science (1829)

Fairy-Land (1829)

Introduction (1831)

"Alone" (1875)

To Helen (1831)

The Sleeper (1831)

Israfel (1831)

The Valley of Unrest (1831)

The City in the Sea (1831)

Lenore (1843)

Sonnet—Silence (1840)

Dream-Land (1844)

The Raven (1845)

Ulalume—A Ballad (1847)

The Bells (1849)

A Dream within a Dream (1849)

For Annie (1849)

Eldorado (1849)

To My Mother (1849)

Annabel Lee (1849)

Letters

To John Allan, March 19, 1827

To John Allan, December 22, 1828

To John Allan, January 3, 1831

To John Allan, April 12, 1833

To Thomas W. White, April 30, 1835

To Maria and Virginia Clemm, August 29, 1835

To Philip P. Cooke, September 21, 1839

To William E. Burton, June 1, 1840

To Joseph Evans Snodgrass, April 1, 1841

To Frederick W. Thomas, June 26, 1841

To Frederick W. Thomas, February 3, 1842

To T. H. Chivers, September 27, 1842

To Frederick W. Thomas and Jesse E. Dow, March 16, 1843

To James Russell Lowell, March 30, 1844

To Maria Clemm, April 7, 1844

To James Russell Lowell, July 2, 1844

To Evert A. Duyckinck, November 13, 1845

To Virginia Poe, June 12, 1846

To Philip P. Cooke, August 9, 1846

To N. P. Willis, December 30, 1846

To Marie L. Shew, January 29, 1847

To George W. Eveleth, January 4, 1848

To George W. Eveleth, February 29, 1848

To Sarah Helen Whitman, October 1, 1848

To Annie L. Richmond, November 16, 1848

To Frederick W. Thomas, February 14, 1849

To Maria Clemm, July 7, 1849

To Maria Clemm, September 18, 1849

Critical Principles

On Unity of Effect

On Plot in Narrative

On the Prose Tale

On the Design of Fiction

The Object of Poetry (from "Letter to B—")

"The Philosophy of Composition"

The Effect of Rhyme

"The Poetic Principle" (excerpts)

American Criticism

Observations

Literary Nationalism

"Some Secrets of the Magazine Prison-House"

American Literary Independence

The Soul and the Self

Imagination and Insight

Poetical Irritability

Genius and Proportionate Intellect

Reason and Government

Adaptation and the Plots of God

Works of Genius

National Literature and Imitation

Language and Thought

Magazine Literature in America

The Name of the Nation

The Unwritable Book

Imagination

Art and the Soul

Superiority and Suffering

Matter, Spirit, and Divine Will

Notes

Selected Bibliography