I wanted them all, even those I'd already read. --Ron Rosenbaum, The New York Observer Small wonders. --Time Out London [F]irst-rate...astutely selected and attractively packaged...indisputably great works. --Adam Begley, The New York Observer I've always been haunted by Bartleby, the proto-slacker. But it's the handsomely minimalist cover of the Melville House edition that gets me here, one of many in the small publisher's fine 'Art of the Novella' series. --The New Yorker The Art of the Novella series is sort of an anti-Kindle. What these singular, distinctive titles celebrate is book-ness. They're slim enough to be portable but showy enough to be conspicuously consumed--tiny little objects that demand to be loved for the commodities they are. --KQED (NPR San Francisco) Some like it short, and if you're one of them, Melville House, an independent publisher based in Brooklyn, has a line of books for you... elegant-looking paperback editions ...a good read in a small package. --The Wall Street Journal Biografía del autor Mary Shelley was born in London in 1797, the daughter of two of the era?s most radical writers: William Godwin, the anarchist utopian, and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who died from the childbirth. After a difficult childhood under a demanding stepmother, she ran off to the Continent at age 17 with her father?s wealthy?and married?benefactor, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, although they did not get married until the suicide of Shelley?s wife two years later. Despite close intellectual bonds the marriage was unhappy, due to Percy Shelley?s regular campaigning for open ?utopian? sexual relationships (with her sister, for one), and the deaths of three out of their four children. In 1817, while visiting Lord Byron at Lake Geneva, the three challenged one another to write a horror story. The result from Mary was the novel Frankenstein, an instant popular (although not critical) success. Four years later her peripatetic husband drowned in a boating accident. Mary Shelley never remarried, but she continued on as a successful writer until her death in London in 1851.