Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus

• Frankenstein in Baghdad

Set in Iraq during the aftermath of the 2003 US invasion, Ahmed Saadawi’s award-winning reimagining of Frankenstein features a junk dealer who creates a sentient creature out of the body parts of bombing victims.

• “Female Gothic”

In an essay taken from her 1976 book Literary Women: The Great Writers, feminist literary critic Ellen Moers characterizes Frankenstein as “a birth myth, and one that was lodged in the novelist’s imagination, I am convinced, by the fact that she was herself a mother.”

• “The Origins of the Species: Mary Shelley”

In the first essay of his 1973 book Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction, author Brian Aldiss explains why Mary Shelley, in writing Frankenstein, became “the first science fiction writer.”

• “The Strange and Twisted Life of Frankenstein”

On the book’s 200th anniversary, The New Yorker’s Jill Lepore explores how modern interpretations of Frankenstein have ignored its feminist subtext.

• “A Tale of Two Prometheuses in Many Parts”

New York University lecturer Anthony Galluzzo discusses why the Greek myth of Prometheus resonates so strongly in the works of Mary Shelley, her father William Godwin, and her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley.

• A Monster’s Notes

In this genre-bending novel by the poet Laurie Sheck, the first-person musings of Frankenstein’s monster combine with biographical information about Mary Shelley’s tumultuous and unconventional life.

• Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron, and Other Tangled Lives

This rollicking biography and cultural study by Daisy Hay traces the intersecting lives and radical choices of prominent Romantic authors and their circle of intimates.

• “Frankenstein: Our Dark Mirror”

In its “Library Talks Podcast,” the New York Public Library invites authors and “monster theory” scholars to discuss what Frankenstein has to tell us about society’s demonization of so-called monsters over the past two centuries, particularly with respect to issues of racial justice.

• “The real experiments that inspired Frankenstein”

As part of their History Club video series, Vox reporters Phil Edwards and Coleman Lowndes explain why in 1818, the year of Frankenstein’s publication, the belief that science could be used to raise the dead did not seem farfetched.

• “Theater of the Mind Radio Drama: Frankenstein”

Inspired by 1940s radio plays, KTWU’s Theater of the Mind stages a live performance of Frankenstein.