No October is complete without a bit of Poe.
This single volume brings together all of Poe’s stories and poems, and illuminates the diverse and multifaceted genius of one of the greatest and most influential figures in American literary history.
Young Frankenstein: The Story of the Making of the Film
By Mel Brooks
Mel Brooks’ own words telling all about the players, the filming, and studio antics during the production of this great comedy classic. The book is alive and teeming with hundreds of photos, original interviews, and hilarious commentary.
Young Frankenstein was made with deep respect for the craft and history of cinema–and for the power of a good schwanzstucker joke. This picture-driven book, written by one of the greatest comedy geniuses of all time, takes readers inside the classic film’s marvelous creation story via never-before-seen black and white and color photography from the set and contemporary interviews with the cast and crew, most notably, legendary writer-director Mel Brooks.
With access to more than 225 behind-the-scenes photos and production stills, and with captions written by Brooks, this audiobook will also rely on interviews with gifted director of photography Gerald Hirschfeld, Academy Award-winning actress Cloris Leachman, and veteran producer Michael Gruskoff.
Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus
By Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly
Mary Shelley’s chilling Gothic tale was conceived when she was only eighteen, living with her lover Percy Shelley on Lake Geneva. The story of Victor Frankenstein who, obsessed with creating life itself, plunders graveyards for the material to fashion a new being, but whose botched creature sets out to destroy his maker, would become the world’s most famous work of horror fiction, and remains a devastating exploration of the limits of human creativity. Based on the third edition of 1831, this volume contains all Mary Shelley’s revisions to her story, and also includes ‘A Fragment’ by Lord Byron and Dr John Polidori’s ‘The Vampyre: A Tale’.
Frankenstein o el moderno Prometeo
Por Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
En 1816, Mary Shelley dio vida al que sería su personaje más famoso, el doctor Victor Frankenstein. La historia es bien conocida: un científico consigue crear una criatura a la que luego rechaza. Metáfora sobre la vida, la libertad y el amor, Frankenstein o el moderno Prometeo es una maravillosa fábula con todos los ingredientes de los grandes mitos.
La presente edición se abre con una lúcida introducción de Alberto Manguel, titulada «La novia de Frankenstein», en la que el afamado escritor y crítico analiza el mito del monstruo y su influencia en la cultura contemporánea.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
Local movie theatres used to show Rocky Horror late nights leading up to Halloween, with dancers, toast, raincoats, the whole nine yards.
A mixture of fantastical rock opera and horror movie spoof. A couple of ordinary kids have car trouble one dark and rainy night and knock on the door of a looming gothic mansion. They are stunned to learn they have stumbled into an ongoing convention of kinky characters, hosted by Dr. Frank-N-Furter, a mad scientist from the planet Transsexual.
Twentieth Century Fox; Michael White-Lou Adler production; directed by Jim Sharman; Produced by Michael White; Screenplay by Jim Sharman and Richard O’Brien.
Book Review: Woman Without Shame
Martha Williams, Director of Programs and Education, recommends Woman Without Shame by Sandra Cisneros.
In her new collection of poems—her first published in 28 years—Sandra Cisneros breathes fearless words into everyday life. The poems in this book are ripe with self-discovery and self-appreciation, but also desire and aging and death. Acknowledging where she may find shame as she ages, Cisneros instead finds joy and humor and a deep understanding of how she wants to move in the world.
That season,
I was experimenting to be
the woman I wanted to be…
I was in training to be
a woman without shame.
~from “Tea Dance, Provincetown, 1982”
Cisneros moves between English and Spanish throughout the book, reflective of her world and the spaces we share. Some poems read like prayers, others like songs or recipes for life, and others still like news reports of acts gone unmentioned.
Cisneros . . . finds joy and humor and a deep understanding of how she wants to move in the world.
Some poems are stamped with a year, allowing us to place them in her life’s timeline. Many feature the dreadfully ordinary—suddenly and simply extraordinary through her mouth—like in the poem called “Smith’s Supermarket, Taos, New Mexico, at the Fifteen-Items-or-Less Checkout Line.” Examining her purchases in comparison to the young man in front of her, she meditates on the pains of young love as compared with the comforts of old love.
We often get to picture her writing or curled up in bed with a book. The pleasure these acts bring is described like new and old love all at once.
I am a woman of a delightful season…
filled to the brim I am.
I said the brim.
“I believe in the power / Of a thought, a word / To change the world” she writes in the poem “Creed,” where she also names mothers and grandmothers as the solution to all violence and points out that no one doubts the existence of love (“Even and especially those who have / Never met love.”)
Through these poems, Cisneros invites us to know her. We are welcomed into her private world, and to see our shared world—for all its pains and beauties—through her magical eyes.
I am a woman of a delightful season…
filled to the brim I am.
I said the brim.
~“At Fifty I Am Startled to Find I Am in My Splendor”
Find Woman Without Shame in English and Spanish editions here.
