Dear Friends of Frankenstein,
As you may be aware, 2018 marks the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a durable novel—never out of print!—with multiple cultural progeny. We have been awarded a Gardner “Magic” Grant by the Princeton Humanities Council to produce several commemorative events.
Our featured event is a reading, with performative flair, of the entire novel over three evenings, October 31, November 1, and November 2.
Princeton will be one of the anchor sites of this world-wide event on Halloween, sponsored in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities, which will be filming snippets from over 300 sites. You can learn more about the project by going to frankenreads.org. As of July 2018 we have 428 partners from 399 institutions in forty countries participating. Our flagship US reading will be at the Library of Congress’s Center for the Book.
We’d love for you to attend, or better, participate in Princeton’s “Frankenread.”
The Princeton Frankenread is free, open to the public, and meant to be an educative, entertaining, and relaxing experience. Rather than exhaust ourselves with a full nine-hour run, we will read one of the novel’s three volumes each night—sited at the fabulous Chancellor Green Rotunda on Princeton’s campus—from 6:30 PM until 10:30 PM. The readings will also include breaks, refreshment, music, and the first ever Frankenstein film, Thomas Edison’s New Jersey-produced silent of 1910.
Readings will be performed by sixty-two members and friends of the Princeton community. We invite you to be one of those readers. If you’re game, we’ll thank you at the reading with another edition of Frankenstein, the gorgeous, informative, award-winning Annotated Frankenstein, edited by Susan and her husband Ron Levao (2012).
In addition to the Princeton Frankenread, we will be organizing and sponsoring a range of other events throughout the academic year, including a series of talks. We hope to see you around!
Yours from the lab,
Susan