Praise for Frankissstein
“Talky, smart, anarchic and quite sexy.”— New York Times
“Winterson has stitched together that rarest of beasts: a novel that is both deeply thought-provoking and provocative yet also unabashedly entertaining (I laughed out loud more times than I could count). Frankissstein, like its protagonist Ry, is a hybrid: a novel that defies conventional expectations and exists, brilliantly and defiantly, on its own terms.”— New York Times Book Review
“A brainy, batty story — an unholy amalgamation of scholarship and comedy. [Winterson] manages to pay homage to Shelley’s insight and passion while demonstrating her own extraordinary creativity… The dialogue is slick and funny, often delightfully obscene, but beneath all the kookiness, Winterson is satirizing sexual politics and exploring complicated issues of human desire… A bag of provocative tricks and treats. With diabolical ingenuity, [Winterson’s] found a way to inject fresh questions about humanity’s future into the old veins of Frankenstein.”— Washington Post
“A riotous reimagining with an energy and passion all of its own that reanimates Frankenstein as a cautionary tale for a contemporary moment dominated by debates about Brexit, gender, artificial intelligence and medical experimentation… While the story has a gripping momentum of its own, it also fizzes with ideas.”—Financial Times
“Frankissstein is intellectually bracing and sexually explicit; a historical literary romp and a futuristic thriller. It, like its characters, rejects the binary.”— Los Angeles Times
“Spellbinding… artfully structured, unexpectedly funny, and impressively dynamic.”— Los Angeles Review of Books
“Devilishly scintillating and quite touching… buy and adore this astute, wildly inventive and totally unique book.”— San Francisco Chronicle
“A timeless writer… [Frankissstein is] brisk, romantic, sharp-humored.”— Wired
“Refreshingly, Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein… is a wildly inventive reimagining of one of science fiction’s most beloved stories… lyrical, gloriously raunchy, pulpy and absurd.”—New Scientist
“Yes, the book we have all been waiting for. Yes, everything Winterson has always done so well. Yes, above and beyond anything that is yet to be written.”—Daisy Johnson
“Hilarious but serious time-travel gambol with Frankenstein: modern doubles into AI, cryogenics, and sexbots. (Hint: Mod. Byron does not come out of it well.)”—Margaret Atwood
Praise for Jeanette Winterson
“Winterson is a master of her material, a writer in whom great talent deeply abides.” —Vanity Fair
“Winterson’s voice, with its idiosyncratic wit and sensitivity, is one you’ve never heard before.” —Ms.
“To read Jeanette Winterson is to love her.” —O, the Oprah Magazine
“Jeanette Winterson’s sentences become lodged in the brain for years, like song lyrics.” —Slate
“Winterson writes with heartrending precision … Ferociously funny and unfathomably generous…Magnificent.”—Vogue
“[Winterson is] searingly honest yet effortlessly lithe as she slides between forms, exuberant and unerring, demanding emotional and intellectual expansion of herself and of us.”—Elle
2023-09-09
Speculative stories and essays about what comes after death—and after reality as we understand it now.
Winterson’s last novel, Frankisstein (2019), demonstrated that she has a sincere appreciation for horror and science fiction and understands how these fantastic genres create a space in which we can ask big questions. In 12 Bytes (2021), she shared her thoughts about how technology, from Ada Lovelace’s protean computer programs to Artificial General Intelligence, changes not just how we experience the world but also how we comprehend ourselves. In this collection, she presents modern ghost stories alongside essays about what ghosts have meant to us historically and how they might manifest in a post-human future. Regrettably, it feels like a step backward for her, though the essays might be compelling to readers who have never given much thought to the concept of an afterlife or technological change. “Religion can be considered as humankind’s first disruptive start-up—what’s being disrupted is death” is a creaky attempt to apply contemporary jargon to prehistory, followed by a lot of spurious theology. But even if we assume that most readers are here for the stories, this collection has very little to offer anyone familiar with the last 200 years of ghost stories written in English. Winterson adds flourishes like virtual reality gear, and in one story, she suggests that we might live on as digital avatars. Even as she’s riffing on a long tradition of spooky tales, she writes as if she doesn’t understand how they work and why they endure. For one thing, most of these stories seem to lack purpose. Even though Winterson’s subjects are life and death, there seldom seems to be much at stake here. More significant, though, is that the menacing specter who appears in “A Fur Coat” and “Boots” is the only truly frightening phenomenon in the whole book. There are, however, some poetically chilling lines here and there, such as, “Maybe that’s what haunting is: time trapped in the wrong place.”
Winterson somehow manages to make ghosts boring.