Hi friends,

Happy Thanksgiving week. It always feels appropriate to me that the anniversary of me launching this newsletter falls around Thanksgiving because I’m so grateful for the community we have here. Whether you’ve been along since the beginning or are new subscriber, thanks for being here.

A few more holiday-related announcements before I introduce Eman Quotah, this week’s guest writer:

• I donated the proceeds of of my Bookshop.org store to Writers Against Hunger, a fundraiser for Feeding America organized by Lyssa Kay Adams, author of the hilarious Bromance Book Club. You can join the team and donate here.

• If you’re looking for an early Christmas gift for the book lover in your life, check out this Bibliophile Advent Calendar. Chronicle Books was kind enough to send one to me and I’m excited to start opening doors next week.

• Give yourself a gift this holiday season! I have a few more audiobooks of Judith Newcombe Stiles’ Hush Little Fires, narrated by her daughter actress Julia Stiles, to give away. It features small-town secrets exposed due to a fire set on Christmas Day. Enter by commenting with your favorite Thanksgiving side.

Today’s recs come from my pal Eman Quotah, author of The Night is Not For You, a feminist horror novel, and Bride of the Sea, an intergenerational family saga. Eman won the Arab American Book Award in 2022 and has written for the Washington Post, USA Today, and many other publications.

And, now, what to read if …

You Want to Know About the Woman Behind Frankenstein

Yours, Creature by Jessica Cuello

I must have read Mary Shelley’s gothic horror classic Frankenstein in college, because I have a decades-old Penguin Classics copy, complete with browning sticky notes on which I scribbled cryptic messages to myself. For example: “creature relates history of De Laceys (what’s point?).” But honestly, I can’t remember reading it. And as for film adaptations (director Guillermo del Toro’s is the latest), I’ve only really seen Mel Brooks’ incredibly ridiculous and funny Young Frankenstein.

Still, I love the story behind the story: The novel’s origin as a ghost story told to a group of friends in a Swiss villa. Shelley’s fascinating biography as the daughter of 18th-century English radicals Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and as mistress, then wife, then widow of Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her life as ...