My Name Was Never Frankenstein

You know the names and the stories, but you've never seen them like this before! My Name Was Never Frankenstein: And Other Classic Adventure Tales Reanimated brings your favorite characters back to life in new and exciting escapades. In this inventive collection, a stellar cast of writers uses classic adventure tales as a launch pad for an eclectic mix of prequels, alternate universes, spin-offs, and total reboots. Imagine Ahab is shipwrecked on an island of cannibals, or Mr. Hyde tells his side of the story, or the scarecrow from Oz struggles with the mystery of his existence. By turns wry and haunting, My Name Was Never Frankenstein upends old territory and classic characters to reclaim them for a new generation.

"Editor Bryan Furuness explains that while this playful collection of 14 short stories by 14 different writers all have similar jumping off points, 'they jump in different directions." The result is, as Furuness says, 'wild and grand and strange.'"

Rachel Brittain is an alumna of Vanderbilt University, but currently lives and writes in Arkansas. Her short film, "The Delivery Girl," has been screened at film festivals in Los Angeles and New York, and her novelette, "End of the World Talk Show," is forthcoming in Hyperion and Theia. Margaret Patton Chapman is the author of the novella Bell and Bargain from Rose Metal Press. Her short fiction has appeared in Diagram, The Collagist, and Prick of the Spindle, among others. She lives in Durham, NC and teaches at Elon University. Michael Czyzniejewski's most recent collection of stories is I Will Love You For the Rest of My Life: Breakup Stories (Curbside Splendor, 2015). He is an associate professor of English at Missouri State University, where he serves as Editor-in-Chief of Moon City Review and Managing and Literary Editor for Moon City Press. Tony Eprile's novel, The Persistence of Memory, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and won the Koret Jewish Book prize. His stories—several of which are literary homages—have appeared in Ploughshares, Agni, Story Quarterly, GlimmerTrain, Post Road, and elsewhere. He teaches fiction in Lesley University's low-residency graduate program. Kelcey Parker Ervick spent many summers visiting her grandparents in Barnegat, NJ, gazing out at Old Barney, the distinctive red and white lighthouse across the bay. Some of the details and journal entries in her story are taken from Women Who Kept the Lights: An Illustrated History of Female Lighthouse Keepers by Mary Louise Clifford and J. Candace Clifford, which she found at her grandparents' house and "borrowed" with a promise to write a story one day. She lives in South Bend, Indiana, an hour away from Michigan City Lighthouse, where Harriet Colfax kept the light for 43 years. She is pretty sure women lighthouse keepers are the most adventurous of us all. Kathleen Founds has worked at a nursing home, a phone bank, a South Texas middle school, and a Midwestern technical college specializing in truck-driving certificates. She got her undergraduate degree at Stanford and her MFA at Syracuse. She teaches social justice themed English classes at Cabrillo College in Watsonville, CA, and writes while her toddler is napping. Her work has been published in The Sun, Good Housekeeping, The New Yorker Online, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Salon and Booth Journal. Her novel-in-stories, When Mystical Creatures Attack! won the 2014 University of Iowa Press John Simmons Short Fiction Award and was named a New York Times Notable Book. Bryan Furuness is the author of The Lost Episodes of Revie Bryson, a novel. With Michael Martone, he co-edited the anthology, Winesburg, Indiana. His stories can be found in New Stories from the Midwest and Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere. He lives in Indianapolis, where he teaches at Butler University. Molly Gutman is an MFA candidate in fiction at the University of Nevada, Reno. You can find her stories and poems in