Borges’ recognition by readers in the United States and Britain was an incredible capper to a decade that even so imaginative a writer as he could not have conceived 10 years earlier. In May of 1961, Borges was a 62-year-old balding, frail former librarian with poor eyesight who lived with his mother, a semi-successful author who had written almost nothing of significance in nearly eight years. A decade later, he was internationally acclaimed.

One Sunday, while having lunch with his friend, the novelist Adolfo Bioy Casares, Borges received a call from a French journalist informing him that he had just won the International Publishers’ Prize (he would share it with Samuel Beckett). Borges thought it was a joke — he had never heard of the prize. As it turned out, neither had anyone else. The IPP had been established that year when six prestigious publishing houses from France, Italy, Germany, Spain, England and the U.S. (Grove Press was the American representative) banded together to honor an author “of any nationality whose existing body of work will, in the view of the jury, have a lasting influence on the development of modern literature.”

For some of the voters, Borges’ influence was already profound. The French had known about him for years; the greatest of post-World War II Italian writers, Italo Calvino, had already written of Borges’ enormous influence in Italy “on creative writing, on literary tastes and on the idea of literature itself.” But it’s doubtful that anyone with the IPP knew how right they were. By the time a generation of college kids discovered him, assisted by Jagger and Bertolucci, Borges would outstrip in fame and sales all the writers who had voted for him. By the end of the ’70s, it seemed like nearly every new American writer to emerge from a university workshop was using techniques referred to as “Borgesian.”

It’s truly astonishing to think how close Jorge Luis Borges came to dying unknown. Most of his classic works — a couple of collections of darkly elegant poems, some provocative and idiosyncratic essays, and a few slim volumes of what he called “ficciones” that defied categorization — were written in his first 54 years. (Has any other writer of the 20th century had more influence per printed page?) If not for his gradual emergence in the late ’50s, largely thanks to a handful of influential European critics, it’s doubtful that we would know his name today. The rich mine of Latin American literature might never have been discovered outside the Latin world, or at least not for a few more decades.

Interest in Borges’ life and work will be piqued again by Edwin Williamson’s massive and assiduously researched new biography. Thanks to Williamson’s association with Maria Kodama, Borges’ longtime companion — whom he married shortly before his death and who became sole executor of his estate — we at last have a definitive biography of Borges. Williamson’s “Borges: A Life” renders James Woodall’s identically titled 1996 biography obsolete.

On paper, it doesn’t sound like much of a life. The sickly, bookish boy had few friends and spent so much time at home that he failed to graduate from high school. His real life would be an adventure of the mind. In his formative years he wandered in his father’s voluminous library, assimilating such diverse works as Anglo-Saxon folk poetry (his mother was partly of English ancestry, a fact of which Borges was enormously proud), studies of the Talmud, Burton’s “Arabian Nights,” pulp detective fiction, and lurid tales of the legendary Argentine outlaw of the pampas, Martin Fierro. Georgie, as he was known to his family, frustrated and embarrassed his father with his inability to make a living; he worked for years at a humbling job at the Buenos Aires Municipal Library. His mother was even more of a drag on his life, squashing every nascent romance by insisting the woman was beneath their social class. If that wasn’t enough, Borges’ avant-garde and liberal notions put him on the shit list of Argentina’s dictator, Juan Perón.

Williamson digs deeper than any previous Borges biographer into the social and political milieu of early 20th century bohemian Buenos Aires. You can almost hear the tango music and feel the breeze carried off the River Plata from the vast Argentinean plains. You won’t ever need to read more about the internecine squabbles of Buenos Aires’ intellectuals; suffice it to say that Borges’ unique approach to the possibilities of literature went largely unappreciated except by a handful of ardent admirers. (A co-worker at the library stumbled on a biographical reference to a little known but critically acclaimed writer named Jorge Luis Borges — and pointed out what he thought was the amazing coincidence of the name.)

The limitations of Williamson’s workmanlike approach to biography become apparent, though, as Borges’ life becomes more complex. On some points, Williamson is almost embarrassingly obtuse. For example, here he writes of his subject’s taste in music: “Borges never had much of an ear: he appreciated Brahms but otherwise tended to favor blues, gospel, and a little jazz.” It is Williamson who has the tin ear if he cannot discern the positive effect folk and pop culture had on Borges’ oeuvre.

Williamson does succeed in attaching intriguing biographical details to nearly all of Borges’ best-known stories, but the facts don’t enhance our appreciation of the stories. It may well be true that, as he writes, “If there is a thread that runs through the maze of questions [about Borges' work] it is Borges’ conviction that writing, ultimately, is a form of autobiography.” Well, perhaps, but there must be hundreds of thousands of middle-aged men who have lived with domineering mothers without giving life to dazzling metaphysical fantasies such as “The Lottery in Babylon”; “Pierre Menard, Author of ‘The Quixote’”; “The Library of Babel”; “The Dead Man”; “Borges and I” and “The Aleph” (Borges’ parable about the key to understanding the universe), to name only a few of the most famous.

No uncovering of mere biographical details in these works can lead us to a revelation of their real magic, and Borges, who loathed Freudian psychology as much as Vladimir Nabokov did, would have gnashed his teeth at Williamson’s persistent use of Doña Leonor Fanny Borges as the aleph of so much of her son’s work. For a truer reading of how Borges melded fact and imagination, one must refer to Emir Rodríguez Monegal’s 1978 “Jorge Luis Borges: A Literary Biography,” where one finds such gems as a biographical note on Pierre Menard’s precursor, a minor 19th century French writer named Louis Menard known for “the rewriting of lost or nonexistent works.”

What neither Williamson nor Woodall nor Rodríguez Monegal nor anyone else has entirely succeeded in doing is weaving the numerous strands of Borges’ influences into a coherent critical vision. Andre Maurois started things in the right direction, I think, when he wrote, “His sources are innumerable and unexpected. Borges had read everything, and especially what nobody reads anymore [emphasis mine]: the Kabalists, the Alexandrine Greeks, medieval philosophers. His erudition is not profound — he asks of it only flashes of lightning and ideas — but it is vast.”

Maurois was mostly correct; Borges read everything, but there was a lot he didn’t finish, including “The Brothers Karamazov,” “Madame Bovary,” Proust and Thomas Mann. A great deal of highfalutin American and European writers left little or no impression on him (the major exception being the French symbolist poets, especially Paul Valéry). The last great modernist of 20th century literature drew his primary inspiration not from other modernists but from styles and modes of literature (fables, folk tales, ancient epics) that had become proud words on dusty shelves and from writers of prose and poetry such as H.G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, G.K. Chesterton (particularly the Father Brown mysteries), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the Irish fabulist Lord Dunsany, and Argentine “gaucho” poets, writers who, for one reason or another, Western literature had relegated to the twilight realm of the praised but unread.

He preferred genre literature to the deep-dish classics. In his “Introduction to American Literature” he gave space to books and writers who most self-respecting North American critics had never heard of, let alone read — for instance, the visionary storyteller Arthur Machen, who wrote horror stories, and the cowboy-turned-writer Will James (whom he preferred to Henry James’ illustrious brother). Borges, raised in the suburbs of the world far from the Western mainstream, became a cultural Cuisinart whose work drew inspiration from high, low and folk cultures. He redefined genres and categories, practically creating the phantasmagoric detective story, the fictional essay and the neoclassic frontier tale. He recreated philosophical fiction, reversing the Anglo-European notion, as expressed from Dostoevsky to Camus, of fiction as a means of reflecting philosophical ideas, and instead probed Hume, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche for fictional inspiration.

He regarded himself primarily as a poet and produced a body of verse that many Latin American critics regard as superior to Pablo Neruda’s and which English-speaking readers have only recently become aware of. He wrote quirky, enigmatic film reviews gravid with mind-candy. (On “Citizen Kane”: “In one of Chesterton’s stories — ‘The Head of Caesar,’ I think — the hero observes that nothing is so frightening as a labyrinth with no center. This film was precisely that labyrinth.”)

Why Borges’ critical reputation has fluctuated in the decades since his discovery is also a subject his biographers have not truly addressed. In part, negative attitudes toward his work that took hold in the early ’90s were a reaction to once fashionable French critical theories that many Americans and Brits had tired of, and Borges, the man who was thought by many to have anticipated some of those theories, went out with the bathwater. (How absurd it seems, in retrospect, that the most original and distinctive of writers should have been used to support undernourished theories about “the death of the author.”)

When norteamericanos began to tire of the excesses of South American “magical realism” in the 1980s, Borges’ reputation suffered, though in fact his techniques had crystallized decades before the Latin writers he was associated with and had little in common with theirs.

Then, too, there was the attitude best expressed by Nabokov in an interview for Time magazine: “At first Véra [his wife] and I were delighted at reading Borges. We felt we were on the portico of a great house. Then we learned there was no house.” Stated another way, the attitude could be expressed as “Is this all there is? Where are the major works — the novels?” Or, if Borges was so great and so original, why didn’t he develop longer works?

There is no simple answer for this question, but it only assumes importance if one regards the novel, as an art form, superior to the short story. (Why not simply regard long poems to be superior to short ones? Are murals inherently greater than miniatures?)

Then, of course, there was politics. Near the end of his life, Borges became notorious for numerous cranky political statements which were aimed at puncturing smug liberal assumptions, but which were often taken by leftist critics as evidence of his reactionary nature. The irony bit deeply into Borges, who had always been more or less associated with the liberal faction in Argentina, more so than ever after his suppression at the hands of the Peronistas.

In truth, Borges’ stance was largely apolitical, a fact that the new left, from which his readership had once been largely drawn in this country, came to regard with suspicion and hostility. He irritated them further by championing popular writers like Kipling and slighting writers beloved by Marxists. “Kipling’s works are more complex than the ideas they are supposed to illustrate,” he wrote, while the reverse is true about Marxist lit, where “the thesis is complex, because it comes out of Hegel, but the art that illustrates it is rudimentary.”

Happily for the current generation, all the cultural baggage of the ’60s and ’70s fades into insignificance now when one simply picks up the work and reads. The petty literary quarrels and partisan politics fade away, and one is left to wander the fantastic labyrinths of Borges without distraction.

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.