Wandering Spirits: Traveling Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

by Selena Chambers, Yves Tourigny (Illustrator)

“…although Mary and these poets experienced a lifetime before they were thirty, here I was at 28, having never left my homeland. I needed to flee—go forth and find sublimity. What better guide than Frankenstein.” —Wandering Spirits: Traveling Mary Shelley’s FRANKENSTEIN Six years ago, Selena Chambers turned her first major trip abroad into a literary scavenger hunt of Mary Shelley’s FRANKENSTEIN. Visiting Geneva, Switzerland, Ingolstadt, Germany, and Chamonix, France over a series of several days, she found within the nooks and crannies of these modern European towns the residual Romanticism that inspired the teenage Mary Shelley and shaped her most famous novel. This special limited edition chapbook collects this Best of the Net nominated travelogue to commemorate the bicentennial of Frankenstein’s conception during the week of June 16, 1816. Written in the epistolary vein as Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, these letters portray Chambers’ visits to three of the most important sites within literature and takes us all on a journey through the sublime.

52 pages, Paperback

Published June 8, 2016

About the author

Selena Chambers is author of Babes in Toyland’s Fontanelle for the 33 1/3 book series (Bloomsbury Academic) and the Weird historical fiction collection, Calls for Submission (Pelekinesis).

She’s been translated in France, Spain, Brazil, and in Turkey, and has published in the U.K. and Australia. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart, Colorado Book Award, Best of the Net, as well as the Hugo Award and World Fantasy award (twice).

 

Reviews

[Ross Lockhart · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stunning presentation of Selena Chambers' epistolary travelogue exploring the locales of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, this Tallhat Press chapbook includes breathtaking illustrations by Yves Tourigny, an afterword providing larger context and history of the travelogue, and extensive notes. Fans of Frankenstein would do themselves a favor to pick this up before it goes out of print in early 2017.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

A short but enjoyable investigation in epistolary form. I highly recommend this chapbook for anybody who works with or enjoyed Shelley's Frankenstein .