Philadelphia Classics Book Club

Originally published in 1968, Love, Anger, Madness virtually disappeared from circulation until its republication in France in 2005. Set in the barely fictionalized Haiti of “Papa Doc” Duvalier’s repressive rule, Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s writing was so powerful and so incendiary that she was forced to flee to the United States. Yet Love, Anger, Madness endures.

Claire, the narrator of Love, is the eldest of three daughters who surrenders her dreams of marriage to run the household after her parents die. Insecure about her dark skin, she fantasizes about her middle sister’s French husband, while he has an affair with the youngest sister, setting in motion a complicated family dynamic that echoes the growing chaos outside their home.
In Anger, the police terrorize a middle-class family by threatening to seize their land. The father insinuates that their only hope of salvation lies with an unspeakable act—his daughter Rose must prostitute herself—which leads to all-consuming guilt, shame, and rage.
And finally, Madness paints a terrifying portrait of a Haitian village that has been ravaged by militants. René, a young poet, is trapped in his family’s house for days with no food and becomes obsessed with the souls of the dead that surround him.

--Penguin Random House

When the scientist Victor Frankenstein attempts to create life in his laboratory, he sets in motion tragic forces beyond his control and faces the loss of everything he loves. Mary Shelley’s original book—with its mythic-minded hero and highly sympathetic monster, who reads Goethe and longs to be at peace with himself—far surpasses the countless adaptations, imitations, and homages which followed. Written at the instigation of Lord Byron and published in 1818, the teenaged Shelley's first novel blends elements of gothic dread and the English romantic tradition, which it at once exemplifies and critiques. (Penguin is releasing a new edition of the 1818 text—tied to the Guillermo Del Toro movie coming out this fall and with an introduction by the English novelist Jeanette Winterson—on September 30.)