The basic story goes like this: Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg, two expatriate American writers, met in Paris in the late ’40s. They were part of a diverse group that included Mordecai Richler, James Baldwin, Alexander Trocchi and the set around his magazine Merlin, on one hand, and George Plimpton and the better-heeled set around the Paris Review on the other. Inevitably, one of the characters most struggling writers in Paris met at that time was the daring and wholly untrustworthy Maurice Girodias, founder of the notorious Olympia Press.

Girodias, often running from his creditors and from government censors, was the first to publish books like “Naked Lunch” and “Lolita.” They appeared as part of his Traveler’s Companion Series, a demure-looking series of baize-green paperbacks that encompassed not only those significant works of modern literature (along with Nabokov and Burroughs, French novelist Raymond Queneau was also represented) but pornography written for hire. Trocchi (“Cain’s Book,” “Young Adam”) and the American Iris Owens (“After Claude”) were among the writers who turned out porn for a quick buck. (Trocchi’s “Helen and Desire” is, if you can find it, absolutely delightful smut.)

Over several years, Southern and Hoffenberg put together “Candy,” whose authorship was attributed to one “Maxwell Kenton.” When French authorities seized the book, Girodias merely republished it under the title “Lollipop.” In the years following “Candy,” Southern made a name for himself as a novelist (“The Magic Christian” and “Flash and Filigree”), journalist, and screenwriter (“Dr. Strangelove” and “Barbarella”), while Hoffenberg’s flirtation with heroin became a lifelong love affair.

“Candy” was published in hardcover in America by Putnam in 1964. But due to the combination of the authors’ carelessness and Girodias’ underhandedness, the book, which was never properly copyrighted, was soon being pirated by a variety of other publishers. Southern and Hoffenberg lost thousands on the pirated editions. They also lost their friendship as Hoffenberg began to resent his partner’s success and as Southern pulled away from Hoffenberg, who had become obsessed with settling the score with Girodias. It was Southern alone who was signed to write the screenplay for the — unwatchable — 1968 movie version of “Candy,” one of the decade’s most notorious bombs.

By then, Terry Southern’s fiction career was almost over. A brilliant collection of short stories and journalism, “Red-Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes,” came out in 1967 (and included some stories that can stand with Faulkner). His penultimate, and best, novel, the wild “Blue Movie,” would appear in 1970. But Southern devoted himself to writing screenplays that went unproduced, or doing polish jobs on other writers’ screenplays, often just generating enough money to placate the IRS, with whom he had trouble for years. There was a one-season stint as a writer on “Saturday Night Live” in the early ’80s (to borrow a phrase from Camille Paglia, Southern writing for “SNL” was like Caruso dueting with Tiny Tim), and also an increasing dependence on booze and speed.

Southern suffered a heart attack in 1995 on the steps of Columbia University, where he was teaching a writing course, and died four days later. Hoffenberg had preceded him in 1986, dying of lung cancer after years of using junk.

(It has been Hoffenberg’s bad luck to have “Candy” spoken of as if it were the sole creation of Terry Southern, and what follows in this piece may be guilty of the same. “The Candy Men” reveals that most of Hoffenberg’s contribution was in the novel’s “Dr. Kranekit” section. Unlike Southern, Hoffenberg left behind almost no other public writings from which to discern a distinctive voice.)

Even if you get lost in the legal maneuverings and depressed by the downer arc of the tale, “The Candy Men” offers the pleasure of a generous selection of Southern and Hoffenberg’s correspondence. We are in the realm of the hipster here, in the company of men who push a joke as far as it can go for the sheer pleasure of seeing what they can get away with. In a 1954 letter written from Greenwich Village to Hoffenberg in Paris, Southern alerts Hoffenberg to a pair of young women traveling to France:

“These are two nifties, Hoff, and will be calling for organ thick and fast. To get the best out of one of them … you’ll be wanting to don a beard and say, repeatedly during the act: ‘I’m your old dad! I’m your old dad!’ and the child will spasm like a veritable machine-gun.”

It wasn’t just to Hoffenberg that Southern wrote like this. After “Candy” appeared in the U.S., an excerpt of the novel was slated to appear in the porno mag Nugget (this was when skin mags actually had some literary content), then under the editorship of the writer Seymour Krim. But Krim, nervous about getting in trouble with the censors, changed a phrase uttered by Candy’s nymphomaniac Aunt Livia, “hot greaser cock,” to “hot greaser stuff.” Southern responded:

“The word ‘stuff’ has vague and amorphous connotations, whereas it is well known that Livia required organ of stout and smart definition, and it does, I must say, reflect editorial shoddiness of a very shocking order. I’m not insisting on the word ‘cock’ … ‘Hot greaser joint’ is acceptable, as is ‘bit,’ ‘wood,’ ‘rod,’ ‘dip-stick,’ ‘shaft,’ ‘staff’ and ‘jelly-roll’ (or ‘jumbo,’ or the very contemporary ‘zoomba’!) … You’ll be hearing from my powerful solicitor who is charged to oversee these instructions.”

You can detect in that seemingly frivolous letter Southern’s insistence on getting the exact tone and rhythm (what Norman Mailer famously called Southern’s “clean, mean, coolly deliberate, and murderous prose”). His friend George Plimpton once described Southern’s style of speaking as combining the sound of his native Texas with mock English propriety and locutions and a hipster habit of abbreviation. Transferred to Southern’s prose, that combination of hipness and propriety allowed nearly anything to be described in language suitable for a speaker addressing the Ladies Sewing Circle at the local Episcopalian church. Take this sentence from “Candy”: “‘Well,’ said Candy, ‘I’ve never met a … gynecologist socially. How do you do?’”

Look at the nuances packed into that brief sentence: Candy’s polite pause — almost a demurral — before speaking the word “gynecologist” in mixed company; the way the emphasis on the conditional “socially” rushes to assure her listeners that Candy has, in fact, been to a gynecologist; and finally the way she steers away from that revelation back to social decorum with the very proper, “How do you do?”

Southern could also parody Rotary Club boosterism. He delighted in taking American glad-handing for a drag through the gutter, as in this sentence from “Candy” describing a pair of preps boozing at a West Village bar: “Jack Katt and Tom Smart there, at a front table, lushing it up and keen for puss.” The rhythm of that opening evokes nursery rhymes (“Jack Sprat could eat no fat”), but the overall effect is a succinct evocation of drunken, horny, loudmouth rich kids. Can’t you see them now, Darien, Conn.’s finest in their Brooks Brothers casuals, slumming it for the evening in a boho bar?

Apart from the concern with tone and language, that letter to Seymour Krim reveals something of the era in which Southern and Hoffenberg worked. “Candy” was published during a period that saw some of America’ censorship laws finally defeated, thanks to the efforts of publishers like Grove Press’ Barney Rosset and lawyers like Edward de Grazia. But the danger of government prosecution was still potent enough to make writers feel as if they were operating under the Puritans.

Consider these particulars: John Cleland’s “Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure” (aka “Fanny Hill”) was first published in 1748-49. It has only been legal to read it in America since 1963. D.H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” has been legally available, both here and in the United Kingdom, only since the early ’60s. Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer” and “Tropic of Capricorn” were cleared of obscenity in the U.S. just a few years later. In 1966 “Naked Lunch” was convicted of obscenity in Massachusetts and then cleared by that state’s Supreme Court. “The Candy Men” reveals that the FBI, under the directorship of J. Edgar Hoover, investigated the possibility of bringing “Candy” up on obscenity charges, but concluded the book was obviously a satire. A bowdlerized version of “Candy” was published in England in 1968 (the critics ridiculed the timidity of the publisher) and the book didn’t appear uncut there until 1970.

This is the atmosphere in which Southern and Hoffenberg brought forth “Candy.” It’s frightening to think that, had the book been written today, it might have faced the legal troubles it eluded in the ’60s. Various bills like the Child Pornography Protection Act outlawed the portrayal of sex between minors, which meant, for instance, that the wedding-night scene in a production of “Romeo and Juliet” could have been legally classified as child porn. What might such an act have done to “Candy”?

In “Candy,” dewiness meets defilement. The joke of the book isn’t just that everyone Candy meets is ready to take advantage of her, just as they took advantage of her namesake Candide, it’s that she participates willingly in her own abasement. “To give of oneself — fully,” Candy writes in her college thesis, “is not merely a duty prescribed by an outmoded superstition, it is a beautiful and thrilling privilege.” Believing it, Candy goes on to meet a succession of men — her literature professor, the Mexican gardener, a guru, a surgeon, her own uncle, and, in the book’s most notorious sequence, a brain-damaged hunchback — out to convince her that it will be a beautiful and thrilling privilege to give herself to them.

Candy Christian has often been classed with Lolita as one of literature’s hotties. But Candy shares less with the knowing, wised-up Lolita than with Lolita’s poor culture-mad mother, Charlotte Haze. Suckers who want to think of themselves as enlightened, they have a ’50s American taste for “progressive” psychology, and for the accouterments of refinement. With her sherry and her copy of “Songs of Innocence and Experience,” no less than the men she gives herself to, Candy believes she’s asserting her independence over the stultifying taboos of her middle-class upbringing. To Southern and Hoffenberg, she represents another kind of American conformity.

Southern conceived Candy as the epitome of all the attractive girls he had seen in Paris and Greenwich Village who gave themselves to the worst creeps imaginable as long as said creeps were able to talk a compelling line of B.S. (The right comment about poetry or art or music and the next stop, as Southern once said, was “Poon City!”) Which is why the most repulsive of Candy’s lovers, the demented hunchback, provides the novel’s most hilarious scene. Candy has — understandably — turned down his charming seduction gambit, “I want fuck-suck you,” but just as quickly gives in after he points to his hump and asks, “Is because of this?” What follows is a wicked contrast of Candy’s “selflessness” with the baseness of her paramour’s intentions:

“It means so much to him, Candy kept thinking, so much, as he meanwhile got her jeans and panties down completely so that they dangled now from one slender ankle as he adjusted her legs and was at last on the floor himself in front of her, with her legs around his neck, and his mouth very deep inside the fabulous honeypot.”

And what’s going on in the hunchback’s mind during this? “… the most freakish thoughts imaginable — all about living and broken toys, every manner of excrement, scorpions, steelwool, pig-masks, odd metal harness, etc.” And there you have it, a sexual Florence Nightingale meets the hell-spawn of de Sade and Quasimodo.

Candy’s descendants were still around when I was in college in the late ’70s and early ’80s, still as curious as they were naive, still ready to dismiss as cynicism any suspicion of “new” ideas and experiences. The cuter they were, the more willing they seemed to throw themselves to the lions. But are the same type of girls around now? What does “Candy” mean in the age of Britney Spears or the Olsen twins — or the Bush twins, for that matter?

You can imagine any of these young celebs setting all sorts of comic bells ringing in Southern’s imagination. But the frankness of their affect and couture — porno chic as marketed by Contempo Casuals — is miles away from the sunny eagerness of Candy Christian. Something in them seems even to resist that favored adjective of dirty old men — “nubile.” You can’t imagine any of them possessing innocence, let alone the cheerful naiveté of Candy. Or at least the same sort of naiveté.

Consider the thimble-deep knowingness exuded by Britney, that look of perpetual blahness on the Olsen twins’ faces, as if they were always just barely putting up with everyone else, they’re not going to be taken in by anything. It also tells you they are not going to be excited by anything. Seen through contemporary eyes, Candy’s unsophisticated attempts at sophistication appear almost like the studiousness of the class grind. And though you could perhaps detect some echoes of Candy’s emerging “social conscience” — in Ralph Nader voters, for instance — its earnestness seems of another time, too.

I don’t mean to suggest that “Candy” is past its sell-by date. Any society whose government can fly into high dudgeon at the sight of Janet Jackson’s breast is still wallowing in the sort of Puritanism that Southern dragged into the bushes and ravished. But I do mean to suggest that society has caught up with Terry Southern. In its crassness, its lust for celebrity, its pornographication, in the willed yahooism of its politics, America has seemed, for some time now, to be operating according to a Terry Southern scenario. For the last 30 years or so, he has been the Edgar Bergen of the American zeitgeist. I wish there had been more Terry Southern books, but his voice is a constant. For me there is no other writer whose voice is more present in American public life, whose distant cackle can be detected in the (often overlapping) lingo of showbiz and advertising and corporations and politics.

It’s the spirit of Guy Grand, the prankster millionaire of “The Magic Christian” who believes that everyone has their price, that presides over reality TV. The people who dumpster-dove in that novel for the money Grand had hidden among the most foul offal now eat that offal on “Fear Factor.” When, as New York magazine reported a few weeks back, Condoleezza Rice attends a Manhattan dinner party and says, “As I was saying last week to my husb — … As I was saying last week to the president,” that’s a prelude to some porno Terry Southern fantasy, the White House as setting for “Mandingo.” When Ken Starr, with the epicene baby-face of a man who, in his 50s, still lives with his mother, succeeds in turning the national dialogue to blow jobs, cigar dildos, and semen stains, it’s a Terry Southern fantasy come true. The only thing that could top it would be the pope having a Tourette’s attack during Easter mass.

A few years back in Film Comment, the critic Howard Hampton suggested that the nympho little sister played by Martha Vickers in Howard Hawks’ film of “The Big Sleep” is the prototype for every fame-hungry porn starlet making her way to the San Fernando Valley. Candy Christian, with her sherry and her LPs of Gregorian chants and her thesis on “Contemporary Human Love” doesn’t seem like much of a prototype for contemporary American girlhood. The new naiveté is of a different sort.

“Candy” feels to me both eclipsed by and cannier than the present time. Teenage girls (and girls not yet in their teens) dressing like porn stars to emulate their idols might have been the product of a Southern fantasy, but they’re a long way from Candy’s applying a spritz of Tabu as she awaits a midnight visit from the Mexican gardener. Yet the Britney and Christina wannabes don’t seem much more sophisticated; they’ve just learned a more hard-bitten way to be naive. No one has yet figured out how to satirize that. Or even whether you can.

My 5-year-old son, Alekos, sits on the balcony of our apartment. Visible from there are pine trees and details of other people’s lives, audible are the sounds of morning, the birds above and voices below. Evenings, Alekos lies on the divan on the balcony in his pajamas, watching the moon. He is obsessed with it, and his father made him a playlist of all the Greek songs that mention it. When he was smaller he’d stare at the moon until he fell asleep.

This morning, though, Alekos lies flat on the ground, peering down through the slats of the railing, staring at the trash. Next to him is his iPad ­– a gift from his father, and yes, I know, but his father doesn’t live with us and what can you do?­ — and now he favors bad pop music like the older kids at school. So I’m surprised this morning when I hear the sounds of Elmo counting. He’s embarrassed by this favorite YouTube clip­­ – it’s for babies, he says ­­­­– but it comforts him. The tension these days is overwhelming.

Alekos looks up when he sees me, furrows his brow, and tells me if he were a deputy like his father, he’d force everyone to clean up the garbage. “And to make a new government,” he says.

I tell him that would be nice.

“At least I can fly,” he says. He is wearing the Spider-Man costume my sister brought him from the States.

I tell him Spider-Man jumps and leaps and sticks to things. He doesn’t fly. “Besides,” I quickly add, thinking of all the balconies around us. “You’re not Spider-Man.” Even I have wondered what it might be like to jump from one to the next. I smooth his light hair, which is growing long. “You need a haircut,” I say.

I hold out two polos, one white, one blue, so he feels he has a choice. He pulls the blue shirt over the costume, and I hope that his teachers aren’t too upset by this because I am too exhausted to argue with him.

Outside, the trash has piled up, and Alekos can’t get into the car from the curb. I tell him I’ll pull the car up so he can get in without pushing his way through the refuse. He wrinkles his nose at the smell. But when I get to the driver’s side, Alekos is no longer standing there.

Instead he is floating 12 feet above the curb, his Spider-Man-clad arms stretched out like wings.

“Alekos,” is all I can say, “get down.” He swoops over to me, hovering just above my reach, and finally glides gracefully to my feet as if he has been practicing this move for months. Bending down to face him and gripping the straps of his backpack, I have the panicked feeling that if I let go he will fly away.

“How long has this been going on?” I whisper. “Tell me.”

One old man walks past us with his hands behind his back and says nothing. He barely notices us. Across the street a woman hurries along in heels, yelling into her phone. No one else is around.

Alekos shrugs, aloof, and looks away with those dark eyes, almost black, like his father’s. “I tried to tell you.”

“Does Babas know about this?” I ask, suddenly sure his father would keep this from me, just the way he failed to mention his girlfriend was staying the night, reading Alekos bedtime stories when he stayed there. Oh, the flying? I thought you knew?

“No,” Alekos says.

“Just at home, OK?” I say. I don’t want to alarm him, but I want to be firm.

He digs in his backpack and tells me he saw his father on the news that morning. This is one reason I don’t like him to watch television at all. For the rest of the drive, we’re quiet.

“I know I’m not Spider-Man,” he says finally, when we arrive.

“OK,” I say. “Do you fly at school?” I ask.

“No.” He looks at me in the rearview mirror, completely incredulous. “Nobody does.”

He gets out of the car and hurries off to meet some other kids, who admire his Spider-Man arms as if they are tattooed. I wait for him to turn around and wave but he doesn’t, and for a moment it seems his feet levitate off the ground. But maybe I am imagining it; he walks in, one foot after the other, like everyone else. I park at the metro station and take the train into the city center, turning up the ringer on my phone.

I call his father three times but get his voice mail. I text him to call me. He texts me an hour later — Ola kala? — and I trip over a split-open trash bag, as if these sidewalks weren’t already treacherous enough. I answer, Yes, everything’s fine. This will have to wait until we are face to face, which is not often.

We met when I was teaching art classes on Paros one summer. I soon got pregnant, and we didn’t get married, but I stayed in Greece. I think he still resents me for not marrying him. To be honest, I can’t even remember my reasons. It all seems like another lifetime, decades ago, when Athens felt proud and vibrant those few years after the Olympics.

A few more messages come from him but I’m busy and don’t answer. Then, when I’m outside the museum, finishing my installation, he shows up.

“You don’t call me three times in a row with no message,” he says, frustrated. “You barely call me at all, unless the kid is on fire.”

No, not fire, I think.

He surveys my project, one giant megaphone outside the  museum, the size of a kiosk, with cameras inside that will film street activity and project it onto a screen inside. Tiny figurines in various stages of undress shoot out from the megaphone, suspended by invisible wire. I’ve compiled old Greek footage of both celebrations and protests, which will air inside the museum, and the outdoor footage will be superimposed on those old clips. I wonder if anyone is inside now, watching us, or what we’re matched with: a hectic street scene, a political rally, a brilliant August moon?

“I like it,” he says, in English, in that supportive tone he uses when he doesn’t know what to say about my work but wants to convey he approves.

“Oh, stop it,” I say.

“And with the garbage,” he says. “A nice touch.”

And the two of us laugh, the first time we have laughed together in a long time, since before the elections, since before the crisis, probably not since Alekos was an infant and we marveled at every smile and uttered “word.” Suddenly I think I should have thought to make those tiny figures children, with wings. I wonder why I didn’t think of it before, why it always takes the manifestation of something so crazy to make me realize something so simple.

“Let me take you for a coffee,” he says, “or something stronger? We can sit outside, where it’s quiet.” The trash stench is so bad that everyone sits inside, smoking.

“You have time for that?” I ask, knowing he doesn’t. I can hear his phone buzzing in his pocket. “I should keep working.”

One night, right before these last elections, he came to pick Alekos up and he kissed me when Alekos went to grab his toys. “Not yet,” I said. My attempt at self-preservation while the rest of the country implodes. It’s hard enough just to be friends.

“OK,” he said then. “We’ll get there, one day.”

Now, I lean into him a moment. Together we survey what I’ve made. I want to tell him, Our son can fly. I want to tell him, Stay.

“Are we there yet,” he says quietly, distantly, not as question but statement, and he rests his chin on my head and looks out into the street: the sleepy shops, the political posters pasted over the boarded-up kiosks, the hot afternoon sun beating down on it all. “Are we?”

And then my phone is ringing­­ — it’s the school office — and I know of course what has happened. I imagine Alekos flying around his classroom like an angry bee, out into the schoolyard, beyond the trash, beyond the protests and our land in limbo. Or maybe he is more relaxed, gliding effortlessly the way I fly in my dreams, his superhero costume and sandy hair glowing in the afternoon sun, until he finds us here, his parents who don’t know where we are or where we’re going, and taking us up with him, catapulting us into the vast unknown. Our images would flicker on the screen inside, soaring above that old footage of our shattered, magnificent city.

Isabel picks up the manuscript with both hands, flips it over, and uses her thumbs to align the pages. She takes a deep breath, lets out a long sigh.

Another night lying in bed, working. She’d fallen asleep at 11, then woke sometime after 2, her mind unquiet. But it wasn’t until 3 that she admitted she was awake. She then picked up a manuscript and a pencil, and started working, page after page, all through the desperate hours. Vaguely reminiscent of those days when Nicky was an infant, in the middle of the night, sleep-deprived, awake in a dormant world. The small hours when a blanket of quiet smothers the city, but through the moth-eaten holes there’s the occasional lowing of a railroad in New Jersey, the distant Dopplered wail of an ambulance siren. Then the inevitable thump of the newspaper on the doormat, the end of the idea of night, even though it’s still dark out.

She stares across the room, off into the black nothingness of the picture window on the opposite wall, its severe surface barely softened by the half-drawn shades, an aggressive void invading the serene cocoon of her bedroom. The room is barely lit by a small bullet-shaped reading sconce mounted over the headboard, aiming a beam of light directly at the top of her head, creating a halo in the reflection in the window. An angel. Except she’s not.

Isabel shuffles into the dark hall, flips the light switch. She turns on the kitchen lights, and the coffee — switched from auto-on, which is set to start brewing an hour from now, to on — and the small television on the counter. Filling the lonely apartment with humming electronic life.

The coffee machine hisses and sputters, big plops falling into the tempered glass. She watches the contraption’s clock, changing from 5:48 to 5:49. Grabs the plastic handle of the carafe and fills the mug with hot, viscous, bitter, bracing caffeination. She takes a small sip, then a larger one.

She walks down the hall, lined with the photographs that she’d unearthed four years ago, when she was moving out of her matrimonial apartment, into this single-woman space in a new neighborhood, far from the painful memories of her home — of her life — downtown, where she’d been running into too many mothers, often with their children. Women she’d known from the playgrounds and the toy stores and the mommy-and-me music classes, from the gyms and grocers and coffee shops, from preschool drop-off and the waiting room at the pediatrician’s. All those other little children growing older, getting bigger.

So she’d bought herself a one-bedroom in an uptown full-service building, the type of apartment that a woman chooses when she reconciles herself that she’s not going to be living with another human being, probably forever. That she’s making her loneliness comfortable. Palliative care.

She lined this nice new hallway with framed photos. There she is, herself, a smiling little toddler. And with her mother on the first day of second grade. At college graduation with her two best friends. There are her grandparents, at the final family reunion before they both died, within weeks of each other. Isabel in a big white dress, aglow, in the middle of the panoramic-lens group shot. A much smaller print, lying in a hospital bed, beaming at Nicky in her arms, tiny and red and angry in his swaddling blanket and blue cap. A grainy shot of herself onstage in a little black dress, accepting an award, beaming again, but not as wide. Some joys aren’t as joyous as others.

It was more than possible — it was inevitable — to blame herself, her ambition, even though she’d never thought of herself as especially ambitious. But everyone has important moments, in any job, at any level of ambition. In the Supreme Court or a fourth-grade classroom, on an assembly line or a fishing boat, there are crucial days.

For Isabel the literary agent, this day was dominated by an auction she was running for a hotly anticipated second novel, whose author needed a lot of hand-holding, and whose bidders kept increasing their offers every half-hour, from mid-five figures to high-sixes in the course of the day. This lucrative 9-to-6 was followed by a 7 o’clock black-tie that included an honor for, and an interminable speech by, a different author of hers. So this frantic day, it featured a wardrobe change. And the evening portion was just as important work as the daytime; just because there was liquor and food and fancy dress didn’t mean it wasn’t work.

The nanny called a couple times during Isabel’s 16 hours at work, worrying that Nicky’s cold or flu or whatever was getting worse. Dave was away on a business trip, and Isabel didn’t want Lupe to be the one to go to the doctor with Nicky; the nanny’s English would be generously described as weak, and sometimes that mattered. So Isabel made an appointment for first thing the next morning. Anyone would’ve done the same thing.

Isabel returned home after midnight, exhausted. She thanked Lupe and sent her home in a taxi, and let her cocktail dress fall to the floor, and collapsed into bed.

She was awakened at dawn by the screaming. Nicky was burning up, 106. She rushed downstairs with the boy in her arms, and ran around the block, panting and desperate, until she found a taxi.  “Don’t worry, Sweetie,” she said. “We’ll be at the doctor’s in a minute.” The hospital was only a mile away.

The taxi peeled away from the curb, the eerie blue light washing over the dingy white garbage trucks, the Mexican kids swabbing down the sidewalks in front of all-night delis, the street-cart vendors positioning their pastries in front of office buildings, the joggers with reflective stripes down their shorts, the normal business of a city’s day starting, coming to life.

“Are we there yet?” Nicky asked, as he had so many times. From the back seat of the shiny SUV that was cleaned every week by the guys in the garage, on their way out to the weekend house in East Hampton, back when her life looked like something to be envied. He had said it on the way to visit Dave’s parents in Oyster Bay, or hers upstate in the Hudson Valley. While heading to Vermont, for a ski weekend; to Cape Cod, to visit friends; to the Bronx Zoo and the Brooklyn Aquarium, Yankee Stadium and Citi Field. It was something the little boy asked, all the time.

But this was the last time.

In the back of the moldy-smelling taxi she pushed the fever-damp hair off her son’s hot forehead. “Nearly,” she said. He shut his eyes, and then slipped silently into a coma, there on the slippery silver vinyl seat of the taxi.

An hour later, Nicky was dead. A supervirus, said the young doctor, who had been up all night, up for who knows how long, working; he was tired and frustrated, and perhaps not as tactful as he could’ve been.

At the end of the hall Isabel stops at the spotlit photograph, a small black-and-white in the center of a vast expanse of stark white matting. A little boy, her baby, laughing on a rocky beach, running out of gentle surf, holding a little toy hammer. Isabel reaches her hand to her lips, plants a kiss on her fingers, and transfers the kiss to the little boy. As she does every morning.

There was, the doctor added, almost nothing she could’ve done. Almost.

Our authors are two people you should be taking to the beach with you this summer. Chris Pavone is the author of “The Expats,” the New York Times best-selling thriller with more satisfying twists than the Pacific Coast Highway. Natalie Bakopoulos is the author of “The Green Shore,” one of 2012′s most anticipated debut novels, a beautiful family drama that is set during another Greek crisis — the 1967 military coup.

To read the stories, just follow the links below:

“Megaphone” by Natalie Bakopoulos

“Almost” by Chris Pavone

What this “Frankenstein” isn’t is a replication of the source text with the addition of a lot of digital doohickeys like sound effects and illustrations that animate when tapped. The app is all about the text, even if it is beautifully framed by period art and anatomical illustrations. The reader is presented with a screenful of narration and then offered one or more responses to it. The preferred response, when tapped, delivers up another screen of text. (In an absurdly pleasing visual touch, these appear as sheets of paper fasted together by straight pins.) According to the press materials, the reader’s responses will shape the way the narrative is presented, although not to the degree of substantively changing the plot.

This is an important point. The pleasure of storytelling lies in the dynamic between the surprising and the inevitable. The reader wants to feel the story is going somewhere, that its events follow from each other in meaningful, but not too obvious ways. When a story can go anywhere, it feels meaningless. In Mary Shelley’s novella, which is saturated with the Western tradition of the tragedy, Viktor Frankenstein’s character is such that he must create a monster, and the monster’s body is such that he can never belong among human beings however much he yearns to. A “Frankenstein” that ended with either misfit finding a comfortable place in the world would be a travesty.

But that doesn’t mean the reader doesn’t long for the story to unfold otherwise; that’s the nature of tragedy. The great insight that writer Dave Morris brings to this adaptation of the novel is that while a reader cannot significantly change the outcome of the story, the interactive element can change the shading and flavor of the tale. It can be mournful and reflective or action-packed. The creature and his creator can show greater or lesser ambivalence about their own behaviors. The ambiguity of both figures is baked into Mary Shelley’s novella, and while Morris has nearly doubled the word count of the original, this mostly amounts to playing up or down what’s already there.

Morris — a novelist who has written graphic novels, games and, yes, Choose-Your-Own-Adventure stories for kids — has changed the original text in other ways, as well. (Let’s take a moment here to point out to all future narrative app developers that hiring a real writer who actually knows what he or she is doing is totally worth it.) He’s moved the setting to revolutionary France, a choice that shows shrewd understanding of the idealistic political climate that affected Shelley’s thinking; the new Republic is its own kind of Frankenstein’s monster. He’s also eliminated much of the 19th-century framing of the tale and converted it into two present-tense narrations. One is Frankenstein’s dialogue with either himself or a (possibly imaginary) companion. The other is a second-person account of the monster’s first weeks of life as it spies on a family of dispossessed French nobility and has the chance to observe the loving relationships it can never enjoy itself.

Morris presents the reader with choices I’ve not encountered in other interactive fictions. Is humanity mostly good, or mostly evil? Does the most recent development make you (the monster) feel hope or despair? Is the revolution the dawn of a brave new world or a descent into chaos and barbarity? While I’m usually skeptical that present-tense narration increases the “immediacy” of a story, in this case, it really does work, particularly in the sections concerning the monster. Depending on your own outlook, you may urge him to keep trying to connect with humanity, or promptly forward him on to homicidal rage.

In either case, the narrative is shaped not by the reader deciding to turn left or right, to go down into the cellar or to get out of the house — the usual actions offered on the choose-your-own menu. Instead, the options have more to do with personality and interpretation, beliefs and ideas. As a result of the reader’s choices, the characters seem more like him- or herself, with a concurrent ratcheting up of emotional investment. To my surprise, I found myself more moved by this adaptation of the Shelley novel than I have been by the source text. (Although the app does include the original if you want to compare and contrast.) This is the only interactive fiction I’ve ever read with that quintessential, old-fashioned readerly avidity: the hunger to know what happens next. Of course, I already knew, but that didn’t matter at all.