PRESS & REVIEWS
A Monster’s Notes
“A remarkable creation, a baroque opera of grief, laced with lines of haunting beauty and profundity . . . [Sheck’s book] defies description and shreds any expectations you might have for a novel.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post
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“An electrifying literary triumph…a thrilling feat of literary scholarship, beautiful wordsmithing, and deep empathy. Sheck gets inside the heads of her characters and fleshes out profound struggles—the leper’s deterioration, Shelley’s grief for a mother she never knew. Through each of them, the creature begins to understand the influences that brought him into existence, even as he remains an unknowable cipher—a metaphor for our own never-ending search for place and purpose. Brainy, lyrical… beautiful wordsmithing, and deep empathy.”
—Jeff Jensen, Entertainment Weekly
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Top 10 Fiction Books of 2009, Entertainment Weekly
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“In Sheck’s rich alternative universe, the musings of this improbable narrator traverse centuries and continents, extending even to outer space. Sheck, heretofore known as a poet, has gone out on a literary limb, and the result is dazzling.” —Rita Dove, The New Yorker
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“An intellectual phantasmagoria…a magnificent book.” —Bill Goldstein, NBC’s Weekend Today in New York
“A Monster’s Notes is only superficially about the Shelleys. Its real subject is human isolation and the consoling echo chamber of great literature.” —Christopher Benfey, The New York Times Book Review
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“As Sheck demonstrates, the lyric essay is a kind of Frankenstein’s monster, equipped with parts sliced out of others, stitched up with genius and white space.”—Ed Park, Los Angeles Times
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“Celebrated NYC poet Sheck richly reimagines the oft-retold Frankenstein in her defiantly original debut novel…This brilliant fiction gathers both seamless coherence and immense power as its elements draw together. Utterly astonishing and not to be missed.” —Kirkus (starred review).
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“A provocative metaphor for spiritual and technological crisis.” —The New Yorker
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“In this expansive and minutely detailed narrative tour-de-force, Laurie Sheck has brilliantly revivified the Shelley-Clairmont circle with its attendant governesses, poets, monsters, explorers, over-reachers, and spectral entities.” —Susan Howe
“Bold and elegant…In the genre-bending and vast undertaking that is A Monster’s Notes Sheck pursues the potentially unattainable answer to an eternal question: How does the mind find freedom?” —Bomb Magazine
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“A whopping what-if, stretching a whopping 500 pages…Throughout, we feel the sensuous pleasure of the act of writing itself – as journals open and close, pages are filled, and innumerable, passionate letters appear and dissolve, like imploring faces in a window.” —San Francisco Chronicle
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“In this emphatic, virtuosic, haunting literary hybrid… Sheck delves into the metaphysics of otherness, the mystery of creativity, and the crushing tragedies within Shelley’s circle. Sheck follows the map of Mary Shelley’s masterpiece to new territories of the soul and creates her own transcendent novel.” —Booklist, starred review
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“Mahlerian in scope…Refreshingly unconventional.” —Ed Siegel, The Boston Globe
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“…brilliant fiction… gathers both seamless coherence and immense power as its elements draw together… Utterly astonishing and not to be missed.” —Kirkus
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“An exquisite metafictional account of a creature’s loneliness and desire to be one with humanity. The novel is challenging, beautifully constructed.” —Library Journal
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“Brilliant… a profound meditation on isolation and grief, language and silence, the desire for connection and solace.”—Financial Times
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“A Monster’s Notes is a brave, brilliant hybrid of a book: it has the intensity of a long poem, the intellectual luster of a work of philosophy, the compelling narrative of the finest fiction. It is completely original.” —Mary Gordon
“A superb lyricist, and… a fearless philosopher for our times.” —Publishers Weekly
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“A Monster’s Notes persuasively reimagines Frankenstein’s monster as a sentient, indeed scholarly outcast who has lived on into the present…It is a superb premise, rich with political and sociological implication, and it emerges with stunning emotional power…This acclaimed poet’s innovative first novel is truly something special.” —The Washington Times
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“The latest stage of this brilliantly original poet. A Monster’s Notes, with its evocative repetitions, tantalizing images of loneliness and lyrical language proves that even if fragments do not make a whole, properly arranged they enlarge our comprehension of the incomplete world encompassing us.” —The New Leader
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“An oddly compelling book, filled with strange and beautiful images and crystalline turns of phrase that linger in the mind. With its widely ranging fragments on everything from polar explorers to John Cage, the French Revolution to genetic privacy, it’s a delight for polymaths.” —St. Louis Post Dispatch
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Island of the Mad
“Compelling, mysterious and hard to shake…utterly one of a kind.” —Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
“Laurie Sheck is a true American original, and Island of the Mad is a remarkable hybrid text that at once pushes the boundaries of literary fiction and poetry and speaks to the reader with tremendous insight and compassion about human suffering and survival. At once wise and thrilling, beautiful and challenging, mysterious and inviting, Sheck’s work cuts to the heart of all that is most challenging and wondrous about human experience. To read Island of the Mad is to have “felt the world touch” us – as the narrator puts it – “with its strange, unpredictable hand.” And what else could we want of literature but this?” —Meghan O’Rourke, The Long Goodbye: A Memoir
“Laurie Sheck is one of the most gifted and original writers at work today; I don’t know of another who so deftly combines the poet’s lyricism, the novelist’s grasp of character and suspense, and the scholar’s love of historical detail. Her previous and path-breaking book, A Monster’s Notes, was unlike anything I’d ever read, haunting and exhilarating. Her latest, the dream-like and mysterious Island of the Mad, is, if anything, even more powerful and moving—and is a book that will be treasured and taught for many years to come.” —James Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 & winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for his book 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare
“Laurie Sheck’s The Island of the Mad plunges into language like a silken dagger, removing us to plague years and haunted mysteries that might just remind us of contemporary lives and dreams. An amazing, exhilarating read that creates its own maze and accompanies the reader deeper and deeper into a miraculous world.” —Jayne Anne Phillips, Quiet Dell and Machine Dreams
“The Island of the Mad is nothing short of brilliant. Its hybrid form hovers between poetry and fiction; grounded in a deep understanding of the past it is also perfectly contemporary in its idioms and concerns. This is ambitious, cutting edge work, both intimate and daringly literary at once. Laurie Sheck is an American Original.” —Lewis Hyde, The Gift
“Sheck returns with a gorgeously written work that layers together strands of history in one bravura act…a dizzyingly inventive work.” —Library Journal
“A poetic meditation on Russian literature, bubonic plague, Venice, and the multiverse… [T]here’s a rhythmic force to Sheck’s repeated tropes…” —Kirkus
“An exquisitely intricate and moving literary pastiche… In concise, haunting, inquisitive, and incantatory passages, Sheck imaginatively and compassionately explores the mysteries of the body and mind, of brokenness and aloneness, while celebrating language as a lifeline across pain, time, and space.”—Donna Seaman, Booklist
Panels/Interviews
Interview on WYCBX, Yale University Radio
Resonances: Contemporary Writers on the Classics Video
Pen World Voices Festival Panel, 2012
Center for Fiction Panel: This is Not a Novel
With Laurie Sheck, David Shields, Shelley Jackson and Wayne Koestenbaum. Moderated by Lucy Ives. March 2, 2017
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