Monstrous

Question: Who wrote Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus? Answer: According to John Lauritsen, in his forthcoming book The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein (to be published May 1), the answer is Percy Bysse Shelley. Oh.

Even before its publication, the book is generating a lot of verbage. Camille Paglia uses the book as a stick with which to beat academics in her blog at salon.com. She also loves the book itself: "I haven't been this exhilarated by a book about literature since I devoured Leslie Fiedler's iconoclastic essays in college back in the 1960s."

Now, Germaine Greer has posted an article in the UK's Guardian newspaper. She defends Mary Shelley's authorship, but it's a faint praise indeed: Greer says of the novel, "[I]t is not a good, let alone a great novel and hardly merits the attention it has been given." But it's all yours, Mary.