Frankissstein: A Love Story
| Category: | Book |
| By (author): | Winterson, Jeanette |
| Subject: | FICTION / General |
| FICTION / Literary | |
| Publisher: | Knopf Random Vintage Canada |
| Published: | October 2019 |
| Format: | Book-hardcover |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Size: | 8.25in x 5.50in |
- Availability:
- Unavailable
Additional Notes
| From The Publisher* | From New York Times bestselling author Jeanette Winterson comes her most anticipated book since Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? about the bodies we live in and the bodies we desire. Since her astonishing debut at twenty-five with Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson has achieved worldwide critical and commercial success as "one of the most daring and inventive writers of our time" (Elle). Her new novel, Frankissstein, is an audacious love story that weaves disparate lives into an exploration of transhumanism, artificial intelligence, and queer love. Lake Geneva, 1816. Nineteen-year-old Mary Shelley is inspired to write a story about a scientist who creates a new life-form. In Brexit Britain, 2019, a young transgender doctor called Ry is falling in love with Victor Stein, a celebrated professor leading the public debate around AI and carrying out some experiments of his own in a vast underground network of tunnels. Meanwhile, Ron Lord, just divorced and living with his mum, is set to make his fortune launching a new generation of sex dolls for lonely men everywhere. Across the Atlantic, in Phoenix, Arizona, a cryogenics facility houses dozens of bodies of men and women who are medically and legally dead...but waiting to return to life. What will happen when homo sapiens is no longer the smartest being on the planet? In fiercely intelligent prose, Jeanette Winterson shows us how much closer we are to that future than we realize. Funny and furious, bold and clear-sighted, Frankissstein is a love story about life itself. |
| Review Quote* | ADVANCE PRAISE FOR FRANKISSSTEIN: "Jeanette Winterson's twenty-first century reboot of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is a fiercely imaginative modern-day horror story about gender, sexuality, artificial intelligence, and what it means to be human. Playful, audacious, darkly comic, and brimming with exuberance and insight, Frankissstein is an absolute delight of a novel." -Amy Jones, author of Every Little Piece of Me "Jeanette Winterson goes beyond the binaries of human creation. . . . [Frankissstein] is bursting at the seams with ideas. . . . Winterson uses literary allusion and contemporary popular culture in various ways to make or reinforce her points, often hilariously. . . . There is some challenging new notion or question about humanness or consciousness on almost every page." -The Sydney Morning Herald "Frankissstein is a book that seeks to shift our perspective on humanity and the purpose of being human in the most darkly entertaining way. . . . It's fun to be in [Winterson's] company." -Johanna Thomas-Corr, The Guardian "[A] riotous reimagining with an energy and passion all of its own." -Financial Times "[T]his fast-paced novel of ideas is animated with ease and vigour." -i (UK) "Jeanette Winterson's Mary Shelley is daring, playful and serious fun. . . . [She] combines earnest concerns with page-turning energy." -The Irish Times "This artificial intelligence (AI) love-story-of-sorts is a clever comic romp that teases at the nature-and future-of life, death and what it is to be human without ever being ponderous." -Daily Mail "Frankissstein makes space for itself in a crowded field thanks to a deeply pertinent engagement with hybridity. Here, hard science and dreamy Romanticism exist in both tension and harmony. . . . Ultimately, this is a work of both pleasure and profundity, robustly and skilfully structured, and suffused with all Winterson's usual preoccupations-gender, language, sexuality, the limits of individual liberty and the life of ideas." -Sam Byers, The Guardian "[A] dazzling reanimation of Shelley's novel." -Brinkwire (syndicated post) "Frankissstein is . . . gleefully Gothic. . . . Winterson's approach is light and comic. . . . Winterson enjoys taking real or potential technological inventions, and prodding and probing at why some make us feel optimistic, and some make us feel queasy. . . . [T]he breezy way she handles the sheer number of complex ideas is also frequently dazzling, and ultimately means that this enjoyably audacious novel has no problem coming to life." -The Independent |
| Biographical Note | JEANETTE WINTERSON, CBE, was born in Manchester, England. A graduate of Oxford University, she published her first novel at twenty-five, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, to widespread acclaim and a BAFTA for her BBC TV adaptation. Twenty-seven years later she revisited that material in the bestselling memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? She has written ten novels for adults, as well as children's books, non-fiction and screenplays. She is professor of new writing at the University of Manchester. |