Atwoods first book of poetry since "Morning in the Burned House" in 1995, "The Door" contains 50 lucid yet urgent poems which range in tone from lyric to ironic and meditative to prophetic, and in subject from the personal to the political.
Key Features: Study methods Introduction to the text Summaries with critical notes Themes and techniques Textual analysis of key passages Author biography Historical and literary background Modern and historical critical approaches Chronology Glossary of literary terms
In Vintage Living Texts teachers and students will find the essential guide to the works of Margaret Atwood. This guide will deal with her themes, genre and narrative technique, and a close reading of the texts will be accompanied with likely exam questions, and contexts and comparisons - as well as providing a rich source of ideas for intelligent and inventive ways of approaching the novels.
The bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments reveals the life of one of the most notorious women of the nineteenth century in this "shadowy, fascinating novel" (Time). • A Netflix original miniseries. It's 1843, and Grace Marks has been convicted for her involvement in the vicious murders of her employer and his housekeeper and mistress. Some believe Grace is innocent; others think her evil or insane. Now serving a life sentence, Grace claims to have no memory of the murders. An up-and-coming expert in the burgeoning field of mental illness is engaged by a group of reformers and spiritualists who seek a pardon for Grace. He listens to her story while bringing her closer and closer to the day she cannot remember. What will he find in attempting to unlock her memories? Captivating and disturbing, Alias Grace showcases bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author Margaret Atwood at the peak of her powers.
“We don’t like bad news, but we need it. We need to know about it in case it’s coming our way.” This delicious, contemptuous and poignant micro-story is the first in the acclaimed collection, Moral Disorder, from towering author and #1 New York Times Bestseller, Margaret Atwood. The bad news arrives in the form of a paper, which Tig carries up the stairs to Nell who is wallowing in bed. A year from now, they won’t remember the details, but for now, the bad news sits between the aging couple as they prepare their breakfast together and Nell imagines them in Southern France as the barbarians invade Rome on what is beautiful day, safe and quiet, for now, from the bad news coming their way. A Vintage Shorts Selection. An ebook short.
A treasure trove of collected works from the legendary author of The Handmaid's Tale and Alias Grace Queen Gertrude gives Hamlet a piece of her mind. An ugly sister and a wicked stepmother put in a good word for themselves. A reincarnated bat explains how Bram Stoker got Dracula hopelessly wrong. Bones and Murder is a bewitching cocktail of prose and poetry, fiction and fairytales, as well as some of Atwood's own illustrations. It's pure distilled Atwood: deliciously strong and bittersweet. 'A marvellous miniature sample case of Atwood's sensuous and sardonic talents' Times Literary Supplement
An instant classic and eerily prescient cultural phenomenon, from “the patron saint of feminist dystopian fiction” (New York Times). Now an award-winning Hulu series starring Elizabeth Moss. In this multi-award-winning, bestselling novel, Margaret Atwood has created a stunning Orwellian vision of the near future. This is the story of Offred, one of the unfortunate “Handmaids” under the new social order who have only one purpose: to breed. In Gilead, where women are prohibited from holding jobs, reading, and forming friendships, Offred’ s persistent memories of life in the “time before” and her will to survive are acts of rebellion. Provocative, startling, prophetic, and with Margaret Atwood’s devastating irony, wit, and acute perceptive powers in full force, The Handmaid’s Tale is at once a mordant satire and a dire warning.
In Burning Questions Atwood aims her constant curiosity and impish humour at our world and reports back to us on what she finds. In it she seeks answers to Burning Questions such as: Why do people everywhere, in all cultures, tell stories? How can we live on our planet? What do zombies have to do with authoritarianism? The roller-coaster period covered in the collection brought an end to the end of history, a financial crash, the rise of Trump and a pandemic. From debt to tech, the climate crisis to freedom; from when to dispense advice to the young (answer: only when asked) to how to define granola, we have no better questioner of the many and varied mysteries of our human universe. INCLUDES NEW MATERIAL FOR PAPERBACK ‘A wonderfully written insight into everything from zombies to the climate crisis’ Stylist ‘The mighty Margaret Atwood writes about everything from granola to Trump' The Times
In these ten dazzling interrelated stories Atwood traces the course of a life and also the lives intertwined with it, while evoking the drama and the humour that colour common experiences—the birth of a baby, divorce and remarriage, old age and death. With settings ranging from Toronto, northern Quebec, and rural Ontario, the stories begin in the present, as a couple no longer young situate themselves in a larger world no longer safe. Then the narrative goes back in time to the forties and moves chronologically forward toward the present. In “The Art of Cooking and Serving,” the twelve-year-old narrator does her best to accommodate the arrival of a baby sister. After she boldly declares her independence, we follow the narrator into young adulthood and then through a complex relationship. In “The Entities,” the story of two women haunted by the past unfolds. The magnificent last two stories reveal the heartbreaking old age of parents but circle back again to childhood, to complete the cycle. By turns funny, lyrical, incisive, tragic, earthy, shocking, and deeply personal, Moral Disorder displays Atwood’s celebrated storytelling gifts and unmistakable style to their best advantage. This is vintage Atwood, writing at the height of her powers.
A dazzling collection of fifteen short stories from Margaret Atwood, the internationally acclaimed, award-winning author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments. Margaret Atwood has established herself as one of the most visionary and canonical authors in the world. This collection of fifteen extraordinary stories—some of which have appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine—explore the full warp and weft of experience, speaking to our unique times with Atwood’s characteristic insight, wit and intellect. The two intrepid sisters of the title story grapple with loss and memory on a perfect summer evening; “Impatient Griselda” explores alienation and miscommunication with a fresh twist on a folkloric classic; and “My Evil Mother” touches on the fantastical, examining a mother-daughter relationship in which the mother purports to be a witch. At the heart of the collection are seven extraordinary stories that follow a married couple across the decades, the moments big and small that make up a long life of uncommon love—and what comes after. Returning to short fiction for the first time since her 2014 collection Stone Mattress, Atwood showcases both her creativity and her humanity in these remarkable tales which by turns delight, illuminate, and quietly devastate.
The renowned poet and author of The Handmaid's Tale "brings a swift, powerful energy" to this "intimate and immediate" poetry collection (Publishers Weekly). These beautifully crafted poems -- by turns dark, playful, intensely moving, tender, and intimate -- make up Margaret Atwood's most accomplished and versatile gathering to date, setting foot on the middle ground / between body and word. Some draw on history, some on myth, both classical and popular. Others, more personal, concern themselves with love, with the fragility of the natural world, and with death, especially in the elegiac series of meditations on the death of a parent. But they also inhabit a contemporary landscape haunted by images of the past. Generous, searing, compassionate, and disturbing, this poetry rises out of human experience to seek a level between luminous memory and the realities of the everyday, between the capacity to inflict and the strength to forgive.
A splendid collection of short stories from the author of the New York Times bestselling novel The Handmaid’s Tale—the inspiration behind the award-winning Hulu original series. Margaret Atwood brings her singular voice to this unforgettable volume of short stories filled with rare intensity and exceptional intelligence. With brilliant flashes of fantasy, humor, and unexpected violence, the stories reveal the complexities of human relationships and bring to life characters who touch us deeply, evoking terror, laughter, compassion and recognition—and dramatically demonstrate why Margaret Atwood is one of the most important writers in English today.
In Good Bones, first published in 1992, Margaret Atwood has fashioned an enthralling collection of parable, monologue, mini-romance and mini-biography, speculative fiction, prose lyric, outrageous recipe and reconfigured fairy tale, demonstrating yet again the play of an unerring wit overseen by a panoramic intelligence. Good Bones is a cornucopia of good things — precise, witty, wise, and sometimes offbeat Atwood writing, with the funny and the sidelong view of the world which her readers recognize at once.
Margaret Atwood’s Good Bones and Simple Murders (published originally as Murder in the Dark) are now available together in this beautiful one-volume collector’s edition. This compilation is a concentrated burst of the trademark wit and virtuosity of Atwood’s bestselling novels, brilliant stories, and insightful poetry. Among the miniatures gathered here are Gertrude offering Hamlet a piece of her mind, the real truth about the Little Red Hen, a reincarnated bat explaining how Bram Stoker got Dracula all wrong, and five home-economist methods of making a man. Atwood has fashioned an enthralling collection of parables, monologues, prose poems, condensed science fictions, reconfigured fairy tales, and other diminutive masterpieces, punctuated with charming illustrations by the author. A feast of comic entertainment, Good Bones and Simple Murders is Atwood at her wittiest, most thoughtful, and most provoking.
The bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments weaves together strands of gothic suspense, romance, and science fiction into one utterly spellbinding narrative, beginning with the mysterious death of a young woman named Laura Chase in 1945. Decades later, Laura’s sister Iris recounts her memories of their childhood, and of the dramatic deaths that have punctuated their wealthy, eccentric family’s history. Intertwined with Iris’s account are chapters from the scandalous novel that made Laura famous, in which two illicit lovers amuse each other by spinning a tale of a blind killer on a distant planet. These richly layered stories-within-stories gradually illuminate the secrets that have long haunted the Chase family, coming together in a brilliant and astonishing final twist.
In the title story from her acclaimed collection Moral Disorder, Margaret Atwood takes us to the farm. At first, for Nell and Tig, livestock would mean deadstock. Newly-arrived city slickers shouldn't have animals, they think, corroborated by the real farmers down the road. But Tig's kids from his first marriage are at the farm on weekends, and it's not a bad education for children to learn where their food comes from. First come the chickens, then the ducks, and before Nell knows it the cows have arrived too. Soon Nell finds herself becoming a different type of woman than she ever thought she might be. The author of such towering novels as The Handmaid's Tale, The Blind Assassin, and Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood creates worlds just as vividly in her short fiction. The New York Times Book Review notes that "the tremendous imaginative power of [Atwood's] fiction allows us to believe that anything is possible"—this applies as much to the world of the Crakers as it does to the strange life of a family in the countryside. By turns funny, moving, incisive, earthy, shocking, "Moral Disorder" displays Atwood's celebrated storytelling gifts and unmistakable style to their best advantage.
In Margaret Atwood's stunning new collection of stories, her first since her #1 nationally bestselling 2006 collection, Moral Disorder, she returns to the here and now in this brilliant, new collection of stories. In these nine dazzlingly inventive and rewarding stories, Margaret Atwood's signature dark humour, playfulness, and deadly seriousness are in abundance. In "Freeze-Dried Bridegroom," a man who bids on a storage locker has a surprise. In "Lusus Naturae," a woman with a genetic abnormality is mistaken for a vampire. In "I Dream of Zenia with the Bright Red Teeth," we remeet Tony, Charis, and Roz from The Robber Bride, but, years later, as their nemesis is seen in an unexpected form. In "Torching the Dusties," an elderly lady with Charles Bonnet's syndrome comes to terms with the little people she keeps seeing, while a newly formed populist group gathers to burn down her retirement residence. In "Stone Mattress," a long-ago crime is revenged in the Arctic. This is classic Margaret Atwood, and she is at the very top of her form.
From the bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments—the "brilliant and funny" story (Joan Didion, bestselling author of Let Me Tell You What I Mean) of a woman whose attempts to escape herself become instead an occasion for confronting the self-deception that has driven her since childhood Joan Foster is a woman with numerous identities and a talent for shedding them at will. She has written trashy gothic romances, had affairs with a Polish count and an absurd avant-garde artist, and played at being a politically engaged partner to her activist husband. After a volume of her poetry becomes an unexpected literary sensation, her new fame attracts a blackmailer threatening to reveal her secrets. Joan’s response is to fake her own death and flee to a hill town in Italy. Studded with hair-raising comic escapades and piercing psychological insights, Lady Oracle is both hilarious and profound.
With the publication of the best-selling The Handmaid's Tale in 1986, Margaret Atwood's place in North American letters was reconfirmed. Poet, short story writer, and novelist, she was acclaimed "one of the most intelligent and talented writers to set herself the task of deciphering life in the late twentieth century."* With Bluebeard's Egg, her second short story collection, Atwood covers a dramatic range of storytelling, her scope encompassing the many moods of her characters, from the desolate to the hilarious. The stories are set in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1980s and concern themselves with relationships of various sorts. There is the bond between a political activist and his kidnapped cat, a woman and her dead psychiatrist, a potter and the group of poets who live with her and mythologize her, an artist and the strange men she picks up to use as models. There is a man who finds himself surrounded by women who are literally shrinking, and a woman whose life is dominated by a fear of nuclear warfare; there are telling relationships among parents and children. By turns humorous and warm, stark and frightening, Bluebeard's Egg explores and illuminates both the outer world in which we all live and the inner world that each of us creates. *Le Anne Schreiber, Vogue
Four of Margaret Atwood's best novels, in one volume! In The Handmaid's Tale, a multi-award-winning, bestselling novel, Margaret Atwood has created a stunning Orwellian vision of the near future. This is the story of Offred, one of the unfortunate “Handmaids” under the new social order who have only one purpose: to breed. In Gilead, where women are prohibited from holding jobs, reading, and forming friendships, Offred’s persistent memories of life in the “time before” and her will to survive are acts of rebellion. Provocative, startling, prophetic, and with Margaret Atwood’s devastating irony, wit, and acute perceptive powers in full force, The Handmaid’s Tale is at once a mordant satire and a dire warning. The Blind Assassin: “Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.” These words are spoken by Iris Chase Griffen, married at eighteen to a wealthy industrialist but now poor and eighty-two. Iris recalls her far from exemplary life, and the events leading up to her sister’s death, gradually revealing the carefully guarded Chase family secrets. Among these is “The Blind Assassin,” a novel that earned the dead Laura Chase not only notoriety but also a devoted cult following. Sexually explicit for its time, it was a pulp fantasy improvised by two unnamed lovers who meet secretly in rented rooms and seedy cafés. As this novel-within-a-novel twists and turns through love and jealousy, self-sacrifice and betrayal, so does the real narrative, as both move closer to war and catastrophe. Margaret Atwood’s Booker Prize-winning sensation combines elements of gothic drama, romantic suspense, and science fiction fantasy in a spellbinding tale. In Alias Grace, Atwood takes us back in time and into the life of one of the most enigmatic and notorious women of the nineteenth century. Grace Marks has been convicted for her involvement in the vicious murders of her employer, Thomas Kinnear, and Nancy Montgomery, his housekeeper and mistress. Some believe Grace is innocent; others think her evil or insane. Now serving a life sentence, Grace claims to have no memory of the murders. Dr. Simon Jordan, an up-and-coming expert in the burgeoning field of mental illness, is engaged by a group of reformers and spiritualists who seek a pardon for Grace. He listens to her story while bringing her closer and closer to the day she cannot remember. What will he find in attempting to unlock her memories? Is Grace a female fiend? A bloodthirsty femme fatale? Or is she the victim of circumstances? And finally, The Robber Bride, inspired by "The Robber Bridegroom," a wonderfully grisly tale from the Brothers Grimm in which an evil groom lures three maidens into his lair and devours them, one by one. But in her version, Atwood brilliantly recasts the monster as Zenia, a villainess of demonic proportions, and sets her loose in the lives of three friends, Tony, Charis, and Roz. All three "have lost men, spirit, money, and time to their old college acquaintance, Zenia. At various times, and in various emotional disguises, Zenia has insinuated her way into their lives and practically demolished them. To Tony, who almost lost her husband and jeopardized her academic career, Zenia is 'a lurking enemy commando.' To Roz, who did lose her husband and almost her magazine, Zenia is 'a cold and treacherous bitch.' To Charis, who lost a boyfriend, quarts of vegetable juice and some pet chickens, Zenia is a kind of zombie, maybe 'soulless'" (Lorrie Moore, New York Times Book Review). In love and war, illusion and deceit, Zenia's subterranean malevolence takes us deep into her enemies' pasts.
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