Hi everyone. This week we're bringing you some bonus content from our library podcasting

team, a special episode that takes a deep dive into Mary Shelley's classic story, Frankenstein.

This episode will tell the origin story of how an 18-year-old girl wrote Frankenstein

and how the story

has been used for centuries to help us better understand some of society's darkest fears.

It features materials from NYPL's collections, and you'll hear from our librarians and

curators, best-selling novelists and scholars who have studied the Frankenstein story.

I helped a little bit with the editing of this podcast and our very own producers put so much energy and heart into it. It was a total labor of love and I'm really

excited for you to hear it. So without further ado, here is Frankenstein, our dark mirror.

I busied myself to think of a story, a story to rival those which had excited us to this task, one which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror,

one to make the reader dread to look round, to cuddle the

blood and quicken the beatings of the heart. If I did not accomplish these things, my ghost story

would be unworthy of its name.

Over 200,000 passed since an 18-year-old girl named Mary Shelley wrote one of the most popular novels on the planet, Frankenstein, or the modern Prometheus, and it is still as horrifyingly relevant as ever.

The New York Public Library is pleased to present an audio exploration of Shelley's novel and its legacy, featuring the library's expert librarians and curators, as well as authors,

still working with Shelley's legacy to create new Frankenstein

stories. And one doesn't need to search farther the New York Public Library's collections

to find Frankenstein and his monster lurking in the stacks. We'll hear about Shelley's lineage

and the story behind her 19th century novel.

She has this dream of the medical student kneeling beside this thing he had made.

To the novel's theatrical and film adaptations.

Crazy am I?

...